


I Fought The Law

by malikyiaue



Series: I Fought the Law and the Law Won [1]
Category: Spartacus Series (TV), Spartacus: Vengeance, Spartacus: War of the Damned
Genre: AU, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-13
Updated: 2013-05-30
Packaged: 2017-11-29 03:31:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 26,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/682236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/malikyiaue/pseuds/malikyiaue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nasir just wants to have fun, and Agron wants to keep people safe.  An AU fic in which Agron's a cop, and Nasir just can't stop getting himself into trouble.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I Saw Him Standin There By the Record Machine

"Mmm... Fuck..." 

Nasir's voice was a breathy, heady moan, hot and heavy and laced with the sort of lust that only happens mid-fuck. His hips undulated against the man in front of him, and fingertips dug into a still clothed shoulder, knuckles white with a desperation. Long strands of hair stuck to his forehead as his back scraped against the brick wall behind him. There were going to be scraped all down his back tomorrow, but honestly when Tony'd started kissing at that sensitive spot on his neck, he'd have been hard pressed to say no. 

And then his teeth'd scraped against the same spot, and Nasir couldn't have said no if his parents themselves had been standing in front of him, disapproving frowns and furrowed brows and smelling of those cheap perfumes his mother liked to buy from the dollar store because she thought they smelled just as good as the expensive sort. 

It'd only been about ten seconds longer before he was shoved up against a wall, his head hitting hard enough to see stars but not hard enough to stop his hands from flying to Tony's belt and unfastening it with a seasoned sort of skill, nor had it stopped him from wiggling his hips just enough to have his own jeans fall to his ankles when Tony'd unfastened them with almost equally as skillful hands. There wasn't anything gentle, or slow about it. It was all desperation and desire, and the sort of intensity that burned as bright as the sun and made it impossible to walk the next three blocks to Tony's apartment for him to even change out of his crappy work clothes, his shirt smelling distinctly of tar and dusty enough that when Nasir leaned his forehead against it in a moment of passion as Tony's cock hit his prostate, it came off with a white coating. 

They weren't quiet either. 

Quiet was something Nasir hadn't ever really cared to learn. He was firey and passionate, and he didn't give a fuck if they woke up the neighbors above them. Instead he cared about the fact that Tony's cock was hitting his prostate, and his own hand was between them, tugging almost desperately at his cock, and there was absolutely no way this wasn't ending perfectly, with him seeing stars and panting desperately as he pulled his pants back up. But he might've bit back his next moan if he'd known what would happen. 

It happened right about the moment that Agron was walking past the thin little alley where Duro's little cat always liked to go shopping for rotten fish that made Agron wrinkle his nose. A moan that couldn't have been contained and that dripped with the sound of sex and want, and Agron rolled his eyes a little bit. "Fucking kids." He murmmered under his breath, squarely ignoring the fact that it'd been a bit too long since he got laid, and maybe the hairs on the back of his neck were standing on end. 

His shift hadn't started yet so he really couldn't make an official arrest or anything, but Agron didn't actually plan on arresting two people for fucking in an alleyway. It wasn't classy, but if they could fuck with that rotten fish smell around them, more power to them (though, to be fair, Duro always said that Agron could smell things a million miles away, and it was really some sort of secret super-power, so there was every chance that they didn't smell it). That was punishment enough. But he did pull his night-stick from his utility belt as he turned to head down the alleyway. Walking around off-duty in uniform wasn't exactly the safest thing, after all, and walking down dark alleys was even less so. 

As he walked, he clicked it against the wall. 

"Shit!" Tony cussed, not paying much attention to the sound, too busy focusing on his dick. 

"Shit!" Nasir cussed, hand sliding from his cock and falling on Tony's shoulders to push him back, because he was always just a bit more aware. 

A moment later, Agron'd pulled his flashlight from his belt, and was shining the flashlight on the pair of them. There was a frown on his face that was more from the smell of the alley than from the sight before him, but he did shake his head at them, and again rolled his eyes. "Take it inside, Gentlemen." He instructed, in a voice that would've made both his Captain and his partner proud for the lack of explicatives . In fact, he sounded entirely professional. There was every chance that scared Nasir more than if he'd been ugly. 

"Come on. Let's go." 

Agron waited patiently - though it didn't take long, as the two of them rather quickly packed themselves away, Nasir's desire killed entirely by having been walked up on by a big brick-wall of a man in a police uniform. Experience told him he didn't like Cops; they tended to be trouble for young gay Muslim boys, especially when they were as clearly white as the one in front of him was. Once they had their pants pulled back up though, Agron just shone his light over them again, and gave them a once over to make sure they were presentable, and then escorted them out of the alley way. 

"Alright. Try to make it inside before you start fucking again, would ya?" He asked, once they were out on the street, raising an eyebrow as he looked down at them. 

For a moment there was quiet from both Agron and Nasir. Tony wasn't quiet, he was busy saying something along the lines of: "Yeah, sure. Of course, Officer. Sorry about that," but neither of them were particularly listening to them, because for a brief, brief moment all they saw was each other. All Nasir saw was green eyes that somehow stood out even in the dark that made it hard to see anything else, and the lines of his face that despite his uniform still made him look kind. All Agron saw was fine features and a sharp jawline that was entirely masculine in spite of the long hair that curled around his face and stuck to his neck in places. 

That was all it was though. A moment. 

And then Agron nodded, and Nasir bowed his head. 

"Yes sir." 

"Go on then." 

That'd been the lot of it. 

It was almost entirely out of Agron's mind by the time he got to the station. 

Almost.


	2. Chained to You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nasir gets himself arrested, and the first officer on the scene is Agron.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for the feedback! After writing it, I kind of feel like the first chapter might almost be a prequel. Also, I suck at both titles and summaries.
> 
> Also, I think the phrase "Fucking Kids" might be replacing "Fucking Gauls."

One of the worst things about being a beat cop was that when you'd been up since eight to make your little brother was dressed appropriately for court because of speeding tickets and not wearing his favorite, hole-y Rammstien shirt, you didn't get a chance to sit down at a desk and just rest for a couple of minutes. Instead, you had to stand around in line for roll call, and get fussed at when your Sergeant points out that your flashlight should be secured and you couldn't tell him about the fucking kids in the alley way to make up for it. 

One of the best things about being a beat cop was when your partner got out of roll-call and came to find you getting fussed at by said Sergeant, and brought you a piping hot cup of coffee, with three creams and four sugars just the way you liked it, clapped you on the shoulder and managed to smile at the man in a way that actually had him backing off. 

"Don't worry, Sgt. Mahoan. I'll keep him in line." Officer Spartacus Ioanndis wasn't exactly any higher rank than Agron himself was, but there was something about him that made people trust him. Right now, Agron kind of wanted to punch him in the face. 

That, or hug him. 

Sometimes he wasn't at all sure which. 

"I could have handled that." Agron grumped as he watched the sergeant's incredibly square retreating back and just before lifting the coffee cup to his lips and taking a sip as if that was the perfect punctuation to the statement. 

"How long, exactly, before you told him to go fuck himself?" 

"About thirty seconds."

For about five seconds, there was quiet. And then both of them started laughing, with Spartacus clapping Agron's shoulder again, and shaking his head head in a way that suggested an amused sort of exasperation. 

It was no secret that Agron and Crixus Mahoan didn't like each other. Hadn't from the first day they'd met, when Agron'd transferred in from a precinct further south. Crixus was the sort of man that expected everything to be just so - by the book and able to pass a white glove inspection. He was a former marine, and it showed in nearly every aspect of his work, from the way he barked orders at them to the way an errant cat hair on Agron's uniform might be enough to set him off. Agron just thought he had a stick shoved too far up his ass. 

There'd been an incident, that first day, where Agron'd been expressing exactly what he thought of their uptight, prick of a sergeant in the locker room when he thought no one would really overhear, and he'd turned around to very nearly bump into the man himself. It'd gotten him pulled into a disciplinary meeting, which'd ended with just a slap on the wrist for Agron, and a warning to keep his tongue in check. So far, he'd managed, but it was a very thin line, one held in check largely by the fact that Spartacus seemed to have the ability to smell trouble brewing, and for some reason thought that Agron was worth defending. 

In those moments of laughter, the tension'd broken like a slow leak in an air mattress, until Agron's too-tightly wound temper was completely unwound, and they were able to smile as they went to the vending machine to pick up a couple of cheap, crappy snacks for the ride along. Generally, they tried to keep a bag of chips in the glove compartment of their squad car, but they'd run out last night, and the two of them weren't very good at working without something to much on. A couple of bags of doritos (Cool Ranch, for Agron, though Spartacus insisted that anyone who could eat those had to be less than human), and a couple of honey buns later, and they were on their way out to the car. 

For the most part, the night passed uneventfully. There were a couple of run red lights, which were boring, though the first lady'd tried scooting her shirt down to show off more of her boobs and Agron'd had the luxury of saying: "Sorry, Lady. That's not going to work on me." Which of course they'd laughed about later in the car, because even if he didn't necessarily look it, Agron, with all 230 pounds of him, was a big old lump of gay. In fact, Spartacus was fairly certain he'd never even considered a pair of boobs in his life, and that his mother might've been lucky to get him to nurse. There'd been one fender bender, and one domestic, and all in all, it was turning into a boring night that'd end with too much paperwork. 

They were sitting in a greasy little diner called Maria's, where the only waitress he'd ever seen was actually named Kathleen and was probably nearing fifty and carrying a little too much weight around her middle and wore way too much makeup in an effort to look younger as she popped her gum and took their order when the next call came in. Spartacus was eating steak and eggs, and Agron swore by the avocado bacon burger, even if sometimes the avocado looked a bit more brown than it should, and both of them had full cups of coffee and only halfway eaten food. 

"Fucking shit." Agron was the first one to hear the call, and tilted his head to get a better ear on the radio. 

Spartacus, mid-bite, decided to let Agron do the listening while he shoveled as much food as he could in his mouth, and then threw down a twenty to cover their bill. Most of the time, their bill wasn't even half of that because they got a good bit of their food for free when they came in on-duty, but they also always tipped well. Spartacus'd once dated a girl who was a waitress and insisted on it out of something that might've been poor-tipping induced PTSD. 

"Drag racing." He explained, standing up behind Spartacus, his stomach still hungry. There was a wry, thin-lipped look to his face at the idea. "Two blocks from here." 

"Fucking kids." Spartacus said, his own eyes twinkling with amusement, as he said what was so often Agron's own tagline. 

There wasn't time to hesitate, though, and they were out the door with a little tingling of the bell, and in their car with the sirens blaring in under a minute. 

It only took them another to minutes to arrive on scene - not long enough for people to really flee. There were some who were pulling away as they pulled up and hopped out of the car, but the two drivers weren't even stopped yet - though they did very quickly when they saw the flashing lights. Screeching tires, and that distinctive smell of burned rubber filled the air. 

Agron was the first one out of the car. 

Just in time to see the driver of a sporty little red car that he couldn't have identified for the life of him between all of the modifications and the fact that he didn't know shit about cars climbing out. 

And again, for a moment, time stopped. Because even with his hair all pulled up, and Agron only seeing him from behind, there was no mistaking the way the few escaped curls clung to the nape of his neck. Nasir was facing the other direction at first, but when he turned around, it was the same sort of situation. He stopped, his eyes wide as he froze, looking up at the same officer who'd told them to pack it up and sent them on their way a few short hours ago. The same green eyes that'd earlier seemed so kind, now seemed filled with a disdain that would have been impossible to describe. 

"You fucking shit." Agron took a step forward, and there was something to the way that he moved had every instinct in Nasir's body telling him to back away. It was instinct that Nasir very purposefully ignored, staying his ground and shoving his lower jaw out just slightly, in a defiant sort of way as his own eyes flashed with a dark sort of irritation. 

"I just let you go three hours ago, and this is what you decide to do?" There was an anger brewing inside him, churning like a storm, where it started a beautiful day and suddenly got darker and darker, and lighting flashed through the sky before finally hitting the ground. There would have been no mistaking it; even if his expression had been neutral, his chest puffed up, and everything about his body language became more aggressive. 

That was why Agron thought Spartacus could smell trouble. 

Because Spartacus, though he was at the other car talking to the young driver who was a good bit more contrite, could see it. "Hold on. Don't move an inch." He instructed the driver, before trotting over to where Agron stood with the dark haired kid who looked like he might actually be willing to have a go with Agron. 

That was the last thing they needed. 

"Schäfer!" There was a barking tone to his voice as he walked up to the two of them, and took his place beside his partner, looking up at the man with a sort of confidence that expected that he would be listened to, no matter how angry Agron might be. "You're getting out of line! Reel it in!"

It earned him a glare from Agron, but the man did at least seem to reel it in. "Turn around. Hands on the hood." He ordered, sounding a good bit more business-like, even if there was still a bit of a scowl marring his face. 

Nasir wasn't sure what to make of it all. He'd been pretty sure that this cop was about to take a swing at him, for what he thought were entirely unjust sort of reasons since he hadn't done anything really wrong. But then the other cop stepped in and protected him, and he had no clue what to make of that, because what sort of cops protected people like him? People who'd grown up breaking the law, and weren't exactly apologetic about it, and maybe had smart mouths of their own, even though he'd never actually said anything himself. Nor was he used to cops with anger issues being cowed so quickly by a reminder that they were out of line. 

The anger in his own eyes had dissipated almost as quickly, instead replaced by confusion, though he hadn't fixed the defiant set to his jaw, or the way the corner of it clutched over and over again, nearly trembling with a want for saying something smart. 

Instead he just turned around, and put his hands on the hood, but he did give him a look that was just as challenging as anything Agron'd ever seen. Which meant that when Agron snapped the cuffs on him, he wasn't exactly gentle, jostling against the man and ignoring the fact that maybe just touching him sent a quick thrill through him. "What exactly were you thinking with this?" He asked, and it was obvious that what he really wanted to say: "What the fuck were you thinking with this shit?" But he didn't, because he was being a good cop at the moment. 

"That it'd be fun." Nasir replied, as smart-assed as you please, grinning widely into the night in front of him, and twisting his wrists just slightly in Agron's touch. "I thought you realized I was into that, Officer Schäfer." There was just a hint of something dark to his tone as well, and Agron really, really fought to resist the urge to push the kid's forehead into the front of his car. Really fought it. 

"Come on, Schäfer. Let's get these kids down to the station for processing." Spartacus said, as he brought his rather compliantly cuffed suspect to the car and opened the back door, gesturing for the kid to get in, and giving a small smile that involved just the corners of his mouth when the boy slid in without issues. 

Agron looked down at Nasir, who'd turned his head to face him over his shoulder and was lifting one of his eyebrows in a challenging sort of expression as he looked back up at him in return. "Are you going to be good, or are we going to have to do this the hard way?"

"I'm handcuffed. How are we not already doing this the hard way?" For as much as he looked defiant, though, he was really kind of being a good kid. He was being as complaint as he could, though he would never really be the sort of man who just sat back and let himself be dragged away without complaint. 

When their eyes caught there was something that caught though. To Spartacus and everyone else still around, it just looked like a battle of wills. To both of them, it felt like something magnetic and instinctual. A pull that started in the pit of their stomach, and drew like a fish hook, tugging and twisting and turning in an effort to see the two of them closer. It made Agron's grip on Nasir's wrists loosen just a touch, and Nasir relaxed his shoulders and quit fighting, and there was something like an understanding between them that they couldn't have ever put to words, and neither of them would have wanted to. 

"Alright, let's go." Agron finally said, breaking whatever spell there'd been between them. There was something almost but not quite soft in the way he spoke now. He knew Nasir wasn't going to fight, and Nasir moved with him just as easily as the kid he'd been racing moved with Spartacus, and though their faces were both impassive, and there was nothing to it, there was a similar feeling of tightness in both of their chests, as if the air around them were suddenly too thin and every breath stung and left them gasping for more. 

The ride back to the station was uneventful. Agron and Nasir and whatever they'd felt between them faded on the way in, and they were left getting out of the car as if they were just two other people, with neither of them getting a feeling like maybe had they not met in this way they might've gone out for coffee or something. 

"For as big a game as you talk, I'd think you worked in some fancy station, not this shithole." Nasir'd said as they walked through the halls (though he still wasn't pulling or tugging on the handcuffs and Agron wasn't dragging him) of their dingy little station. He was right. It was the sort of station that had flashing bulbs on every third light fixture and grime in the corners of a black and crusty variety that they could never really get rid of, and smelled constantly of the too many guys who'd decided to take a piss on the floor of the drunk tank. But where they could keep it clean, it was clean, and the floors were buffed to a shine in the middle, though there was a distinctive pattern of too many people walking in the same place. 

"Just sit down and keep your fucking mouth shut, would ya?" Agron asked as he led him up to a chair, and at least gave a show of pushing Nasir into it, which Nasir gave a show of having been pushed, because it worked best for both of them to still act obstinate and neither of them were willing to give into the fact that maybe they didn't still feel it. Spartacus shot him a look at the cuss, but he didn't actually say anything. 

Nasir fidgeted as he sat there, looking around at nearly everything in the room. From the clock that was inevitably five minutes behind and had all the cops around them checking their phones for the time as they filled out reports, to the stack of paperwork on the desk that they all shared for things like this, and finally, though he'd tried to avoid it, to Agron's face as he typed up the report, his mouth moving along with the words as he typed them. Again, Nasir was struck with the way his face looked kind, even as he got frustrated with himself and his hunt-and-peck typing and had to backspace, and muttered a quiet: "Shit," under his breath that no one was meant to hear. 

For the slightest of moments, his own mouth twitched, and not in defiance or anger, but in something akin to amusement. No one noticed, not even Nasir himself, but for just a flash that would've lasted less than one frame if someone was recording this, the corners of his mouth twitched upwards and his brows pressed together and upwards in the middle and he looked entirely fond. 

It took about a half an hour to get all of the paperwork completed. Finally though, Agron pushed himself back from the desk with a heavy sort of sigh, and then reached back behind him to where the ancient printer that jammed half as often as it worked printed out the report. "Alright, Mr. Anawi." He said, once the paperwork was in his hand, pulling a card out of his pocket and standing up, before realizing that it just meant he had to bend over again at the desk to fill out the case number on the back of the card. 

"Here's your case number. Call in about three days to find out about your ticket." 

Since they hadn't actually caught them speeding with radar, they couldn't hold them overnight, much to Agron's chagrin. He thought they deserved it. But honestly, his shift was nearly over, and his coffee was wearing off and he couldn't be bothered to actually mind that much. It, of course, had nothing to do with whatever he'd felt earlier with Nasir, because he'd just been imagining things then. 

He had to have been. 

Agron handed over his card, as well as handing back Nasir's driver's license and insurance card, and bowed his head at him. Nasir took it with a smile that was more sardonic than anything, and slid them all in his wallet as if he might not later lose the card for the ticket - which he very clearly would. "Thanks, Officer. Just what I needed tonight." He said, as he turned to head out the door. 

"Yeah. Me too." There was a gruffness in Agron's voice that belied a little frustration, but over-all he handled it fairly well, and just waited for Nasir to clear the rest of the way out before going to get himself a new cup of coffee to finish the rest of their reports. 

That was the first time Agron and Nasir met.


	3. I Saw Him Standin' There By The Record Machine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Agron meets Nasir for the third time, and offers a little bit of kindness. Also, we meet Duro.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, guys. There are just songs that pop into my head as I write these chapters, and that is how they get named. I am now making Agron and Nasir listen to Joan Jett. I'm pretty sure Agron at least has a problem with this.

It was only two weeks before Agron arrested Nasir again. 

It was just as unexpected the last time he saw him. Nasir'd been on the street, attempting something Banksy-esqe on the side of the local florist who did not appreciate the social commentary being put on the side of his building, and it was near the beginning of his shift, when there was still a little bit of light out before the sun set. Spartacus'd absolutely burst into laughter that'd been poorly hidden by a choked back smile and a grin when he saw who it was. 

Because maybe he enjoyed just a little bit seeing someone give Agron's attitude back to him. 

“You got this one, right? I owe Mira some flowers, might as well while we're here...” He said, but it was obvious that Spartacus was lying, and was really just trying to make Agron's life harder. Which was why it'd earned him a glare, and a muttered: “Yeah, yeah, go fuck yourself. I hope you're sleeping on the sofa for the next week.” 

But then he'd had to walk up to Nasir, who was very pointedly ignoring him as he continued with his painting – a ying-yang, composed of two women, the bulges formed by pregnant bellies and the dots of opposite color being the fetuses inside him. It was actually kind of a nice piece, and if Agron'd just seen it walking down the street he might've stopped and actually looked at it, but well. That wasn't his job right now. 

“Seriously, kid?” He asked as he walked up, one hand resting on top of the handcuffs against his side. “You just can't keep yourself fucking straight, can you?” 

Fucking. Shit. He wasn't supposed to be cussing. Unfortunately, Spartacus was inside, and there was no one to stop him. 

Fortunately, Nasir just gave him a dirty look, and continued painting. “You can't find someone else to harass?” Nasir replied, cutting his eyes back to his painting as if he wasn't doing something blatantly illegal at the moment, right in front of a cop. Never mind that his stomach was tying itself up in knots because he was doing something blatantly illegal in front of a cop, and not just any cop, but _this_ cop, who made his stomach churn in a way he wanted desperately to ignore. 

“Seriously, Officer. I'm beginning to think you have a crush on me or something.” 

Which just earned him a roll of Agron's eyes that was a little bit more irritated than it should have been, but Agron actually managed to bite his tongue (quite literally; he caught the tip of hit between his teeth to keep himself from speaking), and didn't say anything smart in return. “Yeah, yeah. Hands behind your back, kid.” 

For as much as Nasir's mouth was smart this time, he actually didn't seem as defiant though. 

In fact, he almost seemed pouty. 

Agron, who was fluent in the language of older-sibling, was actually pretty good at determining the difference between the two. 

“So, what's got you defacing buildings today? I'd suggest that maybe you knocked up your girlfriend, thanks to your street art, but I don't think that's your type.” 

“Wow, you really have no grasp on the figurative, do you?” 

But Nasir had offered out his hands with a heavy sort of sigh. After all, he could hardly expect the officer to let him go. And while Nasir was fast, and could outrun most cops who'd had a few too many donuts even if they had a coffee iv, this guy, this Schäfer, had long legs and looked like maybe he was fit, and Nasir definitely did not just have a brief flash of imagining what might be under that bulky uniform and bullet proof vest. 

“I lost my job. Had nothing better to do.” 

They were halfway back to the station when he'd admitted it, having gotten Spartacus out of the flower shop before the man blew his entire pay check, because apparently he'd moaned out his dead wife's name in his sleep last night, and Mira was most definitely not thinking about being forgiving at the moment (something that had been discussed on the ride back to the station, almost as if Nasir wasn't there, which Nasir found halfway amusing and halfway insulting). 

It was almost as if the statement hadn't meant anything. This one had gone a little bit faster (but only minorly, because hunt and peck typing can only go so fast, even if you have fewer details to type out), and Nasir'd spent the entirety of it picking up pens off the desk that he'd decided was Agron's, even if everyone in the station clearly shared the two worn desks that there were. At first, he'd scratched his name in the top of the desk, which'd earned him a glare from Agron. Agron'd reached out, and put his hand over Nasir's wrist to stop him, with a look that told him to cut it out, but when the pad of his finger brushed the underside of Nasir's wrist both of them stopped breathing for a moment and his gaze softened. 

“Don't get yourself in more trouble.” He warned, and there might've actually been a bit of concern there. And Nasir had nodded, and met his gaze, and there might've been a bit of understanding in his gaze and the way the corners of his eyes softened slightly and he glanced down at what he was doing before meeting Agron's eyes again. 

“You got it, Officer.”

Agron wasn't at all sure what it was, but he lingered there, which only drug out filling out his report, but he couldn't help it. From an outside perspective, it might've just looked like Agron was trying to get through to a repeat offender. If you asked Agron, he would have said that was what he was doing. But he wasn't quite aware of the fact that he swallowed, and absolutely no spit went down because his mouth was dry. 

Once he let go of Nasir's wrist to return to writing, Nasir found a new game. One that was almost equally annoying. 

He began beatboxing. 

With the pens. 

On the edge of Agron's desk. 

He was actually kind of good at it, but Agron thought very briefly that he very well may kill this man sitting on the other side of the desk and blame it on temporary insanity, and that any judge in the world would have to understand, because who _did_ that? Who fucking did that? 

Once he finished (the printer jammed twice, and only seemed to work after Agron pulled two bits of crumpled paper out, the first one ripping three times into smaller pieces and then hit it with the butt of his hand), Agron stood up from the desk, and handed Nasir another card. Folded up under the card, though, was a twenty dollar bill. It wasn't much, but it was better than nothing, and maybe it'd by the kid dinner tonight. 

“Look. Keep yourself outta trouble, will ya? I don't want to arrest you again.” 

It was the start of a very frustrating night. 

He couldn't have gotten home soon enough at the end of the day, and almost immediately started burning dinner after realizing that Duro was not home. It didn't take much to realize his brother wasn't home, actually. Their apartment was kept far neater than the police station, but it was almost of a similar vein. It was the sort of apartment that wasn't in the nicest area of town, and had grills over the windows and a distinctive water stain on the ceiling and a far more suspicious stain that he'd tried to hide under the little breakfast table that tucked against the wall beside their tv, and was small enough that you had to be careful when you showered, or the soft scream of hot water in the pipes would wake up anyone else in the house. 

But it was home. 

There was a cd player on the counter top in the kitchen, as outdated as it was, and almost always had some variety of of Motorhead or Rammestien or Metalica in the top and ready to go thanks to Duro (though Agron hardly minded at all, and only occasionally pretended he did to mess with his brother). And there were dishes in the sink from breakfast, and the distinct tell-tale signs of ramen noodles on the counter – the little crumbs, and he was pretty sure that little silver bit was paper from the top of the flavor packet. Duro was supposed to have cleaned the kitchen before he left. 

Obviously, he didn't. 

Agron was about halfway through burning dinner (he was impatient, and did not believe in simmering things on medium heat, because fuck that, it would obviously just cook faster if he turned it up to high heat, and fuck you box that instructed otherwise) when Duro came in, smelling very distinctly of motor oil. 

The look he gave his halfway-burnt pancakes was one of utter disdain. 

“You were fucking racing again weren't you?” He asked, not even bothering to look up at his brother when he heard the door shut behind him. He fucking hated racers. He fucking hated that Duro raced. He fucking hated anything that got Duro caught up in that lifestyle, because he'd seen too many people die in wrecks, and Agron fucking hated it. 

“You were a fucking cock again weren't you?” Came the answer, as Duro took of his jacket and then reached over to pet the cat that'd jumped up on top of the counter where it very distinctly was not supposed to be. 

“I'm worried about you, Duro.” Agron did look up at him that time, over his shoulder though he really should not be looking away from his food, because it might burn. It was probably a lost cause though, because it was all down-hill from there. 

“You worry like a fucking woman.” Duro pulled himself up onto one of the barstools, knocking his knees on the counter and folding his arms in front of him. 

“You act like a fucking child.” 

Duro'd only sat still for about thirty seconds, before he hopped down off his bar-stool, and moved into the thin galley kitchen and bumped Agron out of the way of the stove. Duro was by far a better cook, and he got rid of the pancake Agron'd been making because it was half-burned and really looked halfway like it was some poor knockoff of what Agron was going for. He took over the cooking, and poured out a perfect Mickey Mouse Pancake in a sort of apology. 

“Says the man who still likes Mickey Mouse pancakes.” 

Agron frowned at his brother, and moved to take his seat on the sofa, grabbing a beer out of the fridge. “They taste better.” He insisted, as he always had since before Duro could remember. Beer in hand, he made his way over to the sofa that was actually once really nice, and was still halfway-decent, even if the leather was cracking in a few places from wear. “Just... Be careful, Duro.” He called out, though he didn't really have to call out too loudly. 

“Yeah, yeah...” Duro replied, pulling the pancakes off, because for all of his impatience, Agron always seemed to cook pancakes too long (because he wasn't good at flipping them, and he thought maybe they could really cook all from one side without him having to flip them if he tried it over and over). Putting them on a plate, with Agron's favorite boysenberry syrup, he headed over to the sofa, and held it out to him, flopping down beside his brother. “Eat your food.”

Duro grabbed the remote, and flipped on to Die Hard 3, which they both agreed was a shitty movie but neither of them actually moved to change it. After a bit, Duro leaned over and rested his head on Agron's shoulder, and not too long after the pancakes were eaten and the plate resting on the coffee table in front of him, they both fell asleep to the blasting of terrible infomercials made by men who'd slapped around prostitutes like they slapped around vegetables.


	4. Bohemian Rhapsody

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Nasir gets into an accident, Agron thinks he might blow a gasket.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry guys. For so many things. Mostly that car pun in the summary up there. Yep. That one.

“Squad car 479 we have an 11-81 at the corner of Spring Street and Wesson Terrace.” 

So far, it was shaping up to be a good fucking day. Agron wasn't sure what they'd done to get so lucky, but he and Spartacus had pulled a rather posh sort of post tonight in the sort of neighborhood who's inhabitants claimed to be middle class but really made enough money to make a saint weep (or maybe that was just Agron's over-exaggerated way of thinking). They were doctors and lawyers, and certainly never had to scrape at the bottom of the ash tray in their car for coins to use at the laundromat, anyway. It was the sort of patrol where the worst you had to worry about was kids jaywalking and underaged partying while their parents were out of town, and a wreck with only minor injuries sounded absolutely perfect. 

“10-4. En Route.” He'd practically chirped into the radio, which earned him a look from Spartacus. 

“You're not supposed to be so happy over someone getting in a wreck.” And the look he gave Agron was practically scathing, but there was something in the corners of his mouth that gave away the fact that Spartacus wasn't, perhaps, so appalled by Agron as he might pretend. They kind of quirked up a little bit in the corners – not enough to be obvious, but just enough to be there. 

It was almost as much as Spartacus ever smiled, though, so Agron just counted it as a success and picked up one of the powdered donuts he'd gotten out of the vending machine and pointedly ignored how stereotypical it was that he was eating donuts. 

It didn't take them very long to arrive on the scene. They weren't very far away to begin with, Spartacus drove worse than most people he knew, and yet somehow managed to keep them safe, and the flashing lights on top of the car helped. And almost immediately, before they'd even stopped the car, Agron let out a loud: “God fucking damnit.” 

Nasir, standing beside his own freshly-wrecked car, could hear it even through the closed windows of the squad car and his current level of almost mind-numbing concern. If he'd stopped to think about it, he might have wondered why he hadn't even heard the sirens - as he tried to make apologies to the blonde woman who looked like she hadn't slept in three days and was at least six months pregnant - but he'd been able to hear the sound of Agron's voice clear as day. Something about it was able to reach through the fog and strike him, no matter how muffled he was. 

And it was Nasir's turn to cuss. 

“Fuck.” He murmmered, which made the woman look at him like he'd lost his mind, because he'd just asked her what her phone number was for insurance purposes and she'd replied like that, and really it was piss-poor timing. But he didn't want to deal with Officer Agron Schäfer right now. 

He really, really didn't. 

“Seriously, kid? Are you trying to fucking kill people?” Agron'd come out of the car almost like he had wings. He was unglued. It was obvious in the way his nostrils flared and his chest puffed and he looked like maybe he was about to turn into a dragon or something, if such things were possible in his irritation. 

“This is what, the third time I've caught you doing some illegal shit with your car -” 

“Second.” Nasir pointed out, before realizing that maybe he should have kept his mouth shut, because that certainly wasn't helping his case, or the way the woman was looking at him. He almost instantly became more contrite, and looked down at the ground. All of that fire was gone, because he could have really hurt someone this time. He could have hurt her. 

“This is only the second time you've – wait, arrested? Why are you arresting me?” 

Agron just looked at Nasir like he was stupid. 

Or maybe like his brain'd just fallen out of his ear. 

Maybe they were the same sort of look. 

“You just hit someone. I'm willing to bet you were racing -” 

Nasir rolled his eyes, and they seemed equally determined at the moment to find each other too dense for proper explanation. “Yeah. I was racing with the lady who's six months pregnant.” Which was apparently the wrong thing to say, not only because it set Agron's temper more alight, something that was visibly noticeable, but also because the woman smacked him upside the head and Spartacus didn't even dare intervene when she pointed out:

“I'm only three months pregnant, asshole. It's twins.” 

Which really just made Nasir's day all that much worse. He was beginning to wonder if maybe the universe just felt like shitting on him in general today. Just when he'd forgotten his shit-repelling umbrella, too. 

“Look, what Officer Schäfer is trying to say,” Spartacus very nearly stepped in between them. He was close enough that it felt like he was, like maybe his shoulder was some how in front of Agron, blocking him from getting too close to Nasir, though he wasn't really in between them. Agron wasn't sure if it was Spartacus's own presence, or that weird sensation he got around Nasir sometimes that he'd occasionally caught himself wondering about in the interim, but hadn't ever lingered on too long. Maybe just having someone close, when they were engaged in heated exchange felt like an intrusion. “Is that given your history, Mr. Anwari, we have to bring you in for questioning.” 

Which just made Agron roll his eyes. Because he didn't think Nasir deserved that much dipolmacy after he'd just rear-ended a woman who was pregnant with twins. Even if Agron was the sort of gay who just did not understand the appeal of women because they were such foreign creatures, he did understand that you did not, under any circumstances, hurt a pregnant woman. 

Even if she seemed feisty enough to not be hurt. 

“Yeah. Yeah. I know the drill.” Nasir actually agreed fairly easily. Honestly, he just wanted to get all of this mess cleaned up as quickly as possible, because he hadn't wanted to hit her, and he didn't want to make her life any more difficult than he already had. And once again, he turned his back to Agron, and this time Agron didn't actually have to fight the urge to slam his head into the roof of his car, but he maybe tightened the handcuffs too tight on purpose. 

But he also maybe let his fingers linger on the edge of them for a few moments longer than he should have. In his own mind, it was just to check their tightness, and he wasn't thinking anything else of it. At least that was what his brain said. 

Because he was a cop. 

And this kid was trouble. 

And every cop instinct in him was telling him to stay far away from this whole mess, and to just hand him off to Spartacus and let his partner take care of all of it, but there was something else there. Something that was stronger than cop-instincts and that was more visceral than anything he'd ever experienced. It was less than three seconds, where his fingers circled the edge of the too-tight handcuffs that had Nasir looking over his shoulder at him (and hitting Agron in the face with his hair, consequently), and calling him an asshole under his breath. But in that three seconds, he felt a lifetime.   
And Nasir, for as much as he protested, and called Agron an asshole for how tight he put the handcuffs, let his arms press back just slightly into the fingers he'd felt only fleetingly before. 

What the fuck was wrong with him? 

What the fuck was wrong with both of them? 

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” 

It was nearly an hour later when Spartacus echoed the same thoughts. They'd had Nasir in one of the interview rooms for the past forty five minutes, and Agron'd proceeded to scream every explicative in the book at him. He'd asked him if he was an idiot, which probably crossed a line, and then asked him if he had brain damage, which definitely crossed a line. He'd slammed his fists down on the table like they do in bad cop movies, and there'd been one moment where Spartacus had been distinctly worried that Agron might pick the kid up by the front of his shirt and slam him against the wall. 

“What the fuck is wrong with me?! What the fuck is wrong with him!” Agron offered his correction, not caring if Sergeant Mahon caught him yelling like this in the middle of the precinct at the moment. “So maybe he wasn't racing this time. But obviously he's not some fucking stunt driver if he's able to rear-end a lady, and he's going to fucking kill someone!” 

And perhaps it was a bit of worry for Duro bubbling over, because Spartacus knew about that little past time, because Spartacus'd actually arrested Duro once back before Agron'd been transferred to this precinct, but Spartacus knew it was more than that. 

He didn't know exactly what it was; it was hard to tell. 

But there was something in the way Agron was fighting this, something in the way he was throwing his heart and soul and every single bit of passion that he had – enough to almost overwhelm him – into this that made Spartacus think that maybe a little bit of it was worry for Nasir as well. Agron might've agreed somewhere deep down that this was more than just his normal concern, but he wasn't ready to admit that yet. 

“He's just being a kid, Agron. Trying to have a little bit of fun. Come on, we both knew you did dangerous stuff when you were a kid.” And the look that Spartacus gave him was a very pointed one.   
The look Agron returned was the mischievous sort that he'd learned best from his younger brother. Because Spartacus knew a good bit of the trouble that Agron'd gotten into when he was younger. 

That conversation happened while Nasir gathered up his stuff, and stopped the instant Nasir walked past them, and stopped in front of them, looking up at them both with his brows raised in a sad sort of face that had Agron realizing for the first time just how fucking brown his eyes were, and no one should have eyes that expressive. 

“Look, I just wanted to say I'm sorry, okay? And that I hope she's not really hurt.” He said, before bowing his head and excusing himself, leaving Agron staring after him, in his wake. 

Because it was a fucking wake that Nasir left behind him at the moment. 

Everyone else around him continued functioning like nothing had been thrown off, but Agron felt like he was bouncing and gravity was distorted, and he was riding small little waves, lifting up and then falling back, and like the rest of the world cleared in a path back away from Nasir, spreading out further as it got away further away from him and getting less intense. 

Just like a fucking wake. 

And Nasir was some sort of speed boat that Agron just couldn't figure out (which really made a lot of sense, because Agron didn't actually know what a speed boat looked like, or any sort of boat really; they floated and they went, and that was about the extent of his knowledge. Oh, and that some of them had sails and some had motors, and some had fancy fishing equipment that scanned the water and let you know when fish were nearby. Maybe he actually understood boats better than he understood Nasir). 

And that was about a half an hour before the end of their shift. 

At the end of the night, which was really early in the morning, when Agron went to leave the station, though, he was greeted with a familiar sight when he stepped out into the hot, muggy summer night air. Because leaning against the side of the building with a sort of non-nonchalance generally reserved for greaser types in 1950's movies, was Nasir, a cigarette between his lips and his fingers as if it was the most normal thing in the world. For a very brief moment, Agron thought that maybe he was dreaming. Maybe he'd drifted off at the desk while he was completing paperwork or something. 

Nasir, on the other hand, knew that he was not dreaming. Because if he was dreaming, and he felt someone's gaze on him like that, it'd only be a matter of seconds before clothing was being shed. No, he wasn't dreaming, but Agron was looking at him in such a way – no. Scratch that. When he looked over at Agron, the man actually wasn't looking at him in any sort of special way what so ever, and yet Nasir still felt it making the bottom of his stomach come alive with a warm, bubbling sort of sensation. 

“What are you still doing here?” Agron asked, coughing the words out as if maybe he were coming down with a cold, which was ludicrous, because it wasn't cold season and wouldn't be for at least three more months. 

“I'm waiting for a ride,” Nasir lied, and they both knew it. 

Nasir was a good liar. He had an excellent poker face, and he was employing it now, and no one else would have known that he was lying, but he had a suspicion this had something to do with that unknown element that existed with Officer Agron Schäfer, where the man could just tell what was going on in his head sometimes, like Nasir could tell with Agron himself. 

“Come on, kid. Let me buy you some breakfast.”


	5. I Knew I Loved You Before I Met You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nasir and Agron share a deep talk and some cutting banter over breakfast that includes grapes and bacon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just wanted to thank you all for all of your support! It really means a lot to me! Also, I think this chapter is cute. Hopefully you agree. 
> 
> Also, since I couldn't think of another title, this chapter is dedicated to Marlaina.

At first, Nasir looked at Agron like he was crazy. Agron was a cop, and Nasir was a kid who constantly got himself in trouble, and was he seriously asking him to breakfast? It was written all over his face – in the way his eyebrows arched and the corner of his mouth twisted downwards as he flicked ash off the end of his cigarette. It was written in the way he snuffed his cigarette out and then stuffed his hands in his pockets as if it was cold and blustery. 

“Come on.” Agron said, shaking his head at the protest that Nasir offered without even saying anything, “It'll make you feel better. Get something in your stomach. I know I always worry more when I'm hungry.” 

And Agron could not have explained why he rambled on like that, telling Nasir things he probably didn't need to know or care to know, but he did, and it worked, because Nasir just rolled his eyes, but pushed himself off the wall. When he took a step past Agron though, there was something about his face that made Agron's stomach flip inside him, twisting itself all up in knots that weren't supposed to be anatomically possible. 

It was a smile. 

For as contrary and ornery as Nasir was being, he was smiling as he walked past, and Agron felt maybe a little bit like he was walking on air as he walked off behind him, which was absolutely ludicrous because he barely knew this kid, and this kid was constantly in trouble, but he couldn't help the fact that he felt fucking buoyant. It was probably a problem. Right now though he couldn't be assed to care. 

They wound up at Maria's, being served by Kathleen who gave Agron a dirty look like maybe he was cheating on his boyfriend by coming here with someone other than Spartacus. Agron ordered for both of them, because Nasir looked at the menu like it was written in a foreign language, and when the food came out, Nasir looked at that with even more disgust. 

“How is _this _supposed to make me feel better?” He said, looking down at the plate of grease and fat in front of him (okay, it wasn't just grease and fat, there were also some carbs there, and probably more sugar than he wanted to think about).__

__Agron looked from Nasir's face, down to his plate, and then back up at him, and mentally kicked himself, because was Nasir a fucking health freak? No way. Agron didn't date fucking health – No. This wasn't a date._ _

__“Just eat your fucking bacon.” He replied, a bit more curtly than he really needed to, with a bluster of grumpiness that wasn't genuine, because he felt it necessary to ensure that this didn't feel like a date, because it wasn't a date, never mind that the thought made his stomach do that flippy thing again._ _

__“I don't eat bacon, asshole.”_ _

__“What?” This was clearly a foreign concept to Agron, which made Nasir want to break the front he had going of being offended to laugh, because the way Agron was looking at him right now, he might as well have said that the sun went around the earth. “Who doesn't eat bacon? It's like the food of the fucking gods!”_ _

__Nasir paused for a few long moments. He was being an asshole, and he knew it, and he was doing it kind of purposefully, though he wasn't entirely sure why he felt like teasing Agron so much. But it seemed like fun, and honestly, even as he did it, his thoughts were laced with a type of affection he couldn't at all explain. Once he felt like he'd let Agron stew in disbelief long enough, and let Agron pick up his own piece of bacon and chomp into it as if that was definitive of what you should do with bacon, he answered:_ _

__“Muslims, that's who. We don't eat pork.”_ _

__The entire diner could practically hear the way the gears of Agron's brain screeched to a hault when Nasir said that, and his mouth fell open a little bit, showing off a bit of his breakfast in the most appealing of ways. He looked at Nasir in shock for a moment, and then shut his mouth and swallowed and looked down at the table in front of them in contriteness, because maybe he had been an asshole to say that._ _

__“Oh.”_ _

__That was all he managed to get out, before looking around the room uncomfortably. Agron had never been the best with words. Spartacus saved his ass on many occasions, because Agron just spoke without thinking, and right now that'd gotten him into a little bit of trouble, and for some reason he distinctly didn't want to offend Nasir. Well. Good job on that one, buddy. He did great on that one. He'd be lucky if Nasir didn't file a complaint about him doing some sort of racial profiling or some shit, let alone actually ever spoke to him again._ _

__Wait._ _

__When was he planning on talking to Nasir again?_ _

__This wasn't a date, he had to remind himself. This was him taking the kid to breakfast becase Nasir'd had a bad day and was obviously kind of upset and Agron was a good guy. He wasn't planning on talking to Nasir again, so if Nasir didn't want to talk to him, that was totally okay._ _

__Except that it wasn't._ _

__And he didn't know why._ _

__After a significant enough pause that made Nasir want to laugh at him because he wasn't actually offended, and Agron's worry was clear as day and so completely unnecessary, Agron managed to smile. It wasn't a sure, certain sort of smile, but it was kind of wobbly around the edges and there was a bit of hope in his eyes, but definitely not confidence, and he said:_ _

__“Well, they also make the best hashbrowns here. They crisp them just right, and they add in onions and bell-peppers, and -”_ _

__As it became obvious that Agron was about to launch into a filibuster on the brilliance of Maria's hashbrowns, Nasir inturrupted him._ _

__“Why are you buying me breakfast, anyway?” And while he teased so often, right now he was honestly suspicious, because in his experience cops didn't help gay muslim kids. Cops tended to have issues with gay muslim kids that led to police brutality, and not awkward rambling about the quality of hashbrowns, and how you could never eat them at Ihop because they were just too soggy._ _

__It was a good question, though, because it did break him out of the awkward rambling._ _

__“Because you're a pain in the ass -” And okay, Agron wasn't about to be winning any awards for his romantic speeches anytime soon, “But you seem like a good kid who's just lost your way.”_ _

__“I'm not a fucking kid.”_ _

__“Well, I didn't mean literally, obviously.”_ _

__And then silence fell over them. It started out a little bit bitterly on both of their parts, because Agron was being condescending even if he didn't realize it, and Nasir was being a prick in general because he knew that Agron didn't mean to be an ass, but for some reason it very rapidly became sort of comfortable. They chewed and gazed out the window and down at the menu as if it held some sort of secrets, and when a young man obviously still drunk from the night before started hitting on Kathleen they looked at each other, and both of them smiled in a way that might've lit up the room, and between them it was almost like they were glowing. Agron reached across the table and took Nasir's bacon, and Nasir reached across and stole some of Agron's grapes without bothering to ask, and sucked the syrup that'd spilled on the outsides of them before popping them in his mouth._ _

__Agron'd watched him. At first, he'd considered saying something about Nasir just stealing food off his plate without asking, but then Nasir'd eaten them like that, and Agron couldn't even remember that he'd wanted to protest in the first place and had to make a conscious effort to keep his mouth from dropping open, and could not at all make a conscious effort to keep other parts of his body in check as he watched as the muscles of the man's jaw and neck moved to remove the sticky sweet syrup from the edges of the grapes._ _

__That was what'd broken the silence, because Agron had to have something to talk about. He couldn't just sit here and watch Nasir eat grapes, or he'd lose his mind completely, and he might actually start considering this a date._ _

__“So, I don't get it.” He started, taking a bite of his toast that was covered with too much butter and too much jam to be healthy at all, “Why do people race? It just seems like such a pointlessly dangerous hobby...”_ _

__There was a genuineness in the way he asked the question that had Nasir pausing – a grape halfway between his lips and circled by his mouth and that just _was not fair_ \- as he considered why he raced. And what it must look like to an outsider. _ _

__“It's an escape.” He said, after a long pause that did eventually involve eating that fucking grape. There was a seriousness, almost a wistfulness in his voice as he talked about it, and even Agron in all of his stubbornness and all of his insistence that this was dangerous and stupid could see how much Nasir really loved it. “It's like we grow up with all of these rules, and we always have to obey them and try to be good, even when they're dumb and don't make any sense.” He paused, because cops lived for rules, and stole a hooded glance up at Agron, because he was mostly telling all of this to the waffle on his plate, but Agron was actually listening. He was nibbling a bit on some of his hash-browns, and absently dipping his fork into his catsup and lifting it to his mouth because he hadn't gotten enough in his last bite, but he seemed to be enthralled with what Nasir was saying – really and honestly listening._ _

__It gave Nasir the courage to continue speaking. “You know what I mean. I grew up a gay muslim kid, and why was it wrong to feel the way I did? Why was it wrong that I had crushes on other boys? And why is it wrong to paint beautiful things on the sides of buildings?” He asked, almost getting carried away himself. “So much of it just doesn't make any sense, and it gets confusing and frustrating, but when I'm behind the wheel and going so fast that even a half a second is too long, there's just no time to think about anything else. There's no time to think about how things might be wrong, or the fact that my parents don't talk to me any more or that I've lost my job. There's only the speed and the car and the movement, and it kind of sometimes feels like maybe if you go fast enough, you can escape all of it forever.”_ _

__It was probably the deepest explanation Nasir'd ever given anyone about why he raced. He wasn't entirely sure why he'd just spilled all of that to a cop who'd bought him breakfast one time, and otherwise arrested him too many times. He wasn't sure why he thought he could trust Agron with all of that, but he did. And he didn't regret any of it, and instead just set his jaw when he looked up again to meet Agron's gaze._ _

__Agron did not answer immediately. He couldn't._ _

__Because Agron'd never been one to see things in terms of black and white. His getting onto the police force had been something of a miracle, considering all of the trouble he and Duro'd gotten into when they were younger, and he understood. He understood wanting to run away from it all, because he had at several points in his life, but Agron was Agron, and he refused to give into that desire, and he'd pushed himself harder, to be better, to make up for his guilt. But he didn't say any of that._ _

__“Just be careful, okay? And keep yourself out of trouble. I like you; I'd hate to see anything happen to you.”_ _

__That was what he actually said._ _

__The rest of the meal concluded in the same sort of silence that'd taken place before their talk, and Agron'd pulled out his wallet and thrown down enough money to cover their bill and their tip without actually having to see the check because he ate here so often. There was a moment in the doorway, when they'd both tried to walk through at the same time and their chests had brushed together lightly and both of them had been certain that their hearts stopped beating and their breath stopped and all of everything suspended, but it was only a moment and then they parted ways._ _

__Nasir never said thanks._ _

__Agron never expected it._ _


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Agron and Spartacus get called to another race, and get there just in time to see a crash.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry. 
> 
> That is all.

It was a couple of months before Agron saw Nasir again. 

For the most part, he didn't really think about it. There were a few moments where he'd passed the florist and seen his artwork, or Duro'd come home smelling of motor oil where he'd wondered about him, but after the first couple of weeks those began to fade. He was glad the kid was staying out of trouble, and that's all he should be. In the interim, Agron'd gone on a couple of dates – one with a firefighter who was devastatingly handsome but ultimately not right, and he'd started going back to the gym, and not just the police gym and he'd actually managed to make pancakes without burning them once. In the interim, Nasir'd ended things with Tony, who was always more like a fuck-buddy anyway, and he'd looked into safety regulations though he didn't plan on quitting racing and he'd started looking into community college. 

And even if they weren't actively in each other's lives, and neither of them realized it, they'd both had a positive influence on the other. 

Then, one day when spring was just beginning to peak around the corner, teasing them with beautiful days, only to crash their hopes with days like today where everything was grey and misty and kind of chilly and just otherwise miserable, they got another call for racing. Agron - who was sitting on top of the desk and putting bits of paper in front of the screen to make it difficult for Spartacus as he tried to type up his reports and generally just being an ass because someone'd broken the coffee machine, and if he couldn't have caffine to keep him awake clearly thought bugging his partner was the best option - let out a low, chest-deep groan at the idea. 

Spartacus laughed. 

Which was clearly not the right reaction, because then even Spartacus got a dirty look from Sgt. Mahon, who apparently didn't think that kids drag racing and Agron being a dick was worthy of laughter. It didn't cow him at all though, and Spartacus just shrugged his shoulder at Crixus and then grinned up at Agron, dimples in his cheeks and his blue eyes dancing with amusement. 

“Looks like your boy's at it again.” He teased, pulling himself up from the desk and slapping Agron on the shoulder, which earned him a grumbled: “He's not my boy,” which Spartacus took as more of admission than anything, since it admitted to the fact that Agron knew exactly who he was talking about. 

Fucker. 

But they'd both piled into their car, and pulled out to head to the scene, blue lights flashing. 

The kids who were driving obviously didn't see them coming, and hadn't been ready for the cops. There was a crowd watching and cheering who didn't have time to disperse, and Agron and Spartacus saw the two cars that were racing the moment before Spartacus and Agron saw them. 

One was white with an obnoxious rear spoiler and a licence plate of H107B9 that burned intself into Agron's brain and when the driver of that car saw the cops coming, he hit his breaks too fast. The ground was too wet for him to get proper traction, and before the driver could stop it, his car was spinning out of control, hydroplaning in what was clearly going to be something devastating. It took him less time than Agron could even process for the nose of his car to clip the rear of the dark car next to him and send it into a similar spiral, and while the white car managed to only spin a few times before coming to a relatively safe stop, pointing 180 degrees in the wrong direction, the dark car was not so lucky. Because his spin sent him straight into the barrier wall that seperated the two sides of the highway. 

Agron's heart stopped in his chest, and he froze for a moment in his seat, and there was only one thought on his mind as he watched the car crumple, watched the steel bend in those safety points there were obviously not keeping the driver of that car safe: _Nasir_. 

Maybe later, when things calmed down, he'd wonder why Nasir'd been the first person to pop into his mind when it came to something like that, considering he barely even knew the man, but he let the thought go almost as quickly as it'd come. That was not Nasir's car. 

A wave of relief that was too intense for what it should be washed over him, and Agron hopped out of the car, his log legs taking him over towards the scene. “Call an ambulance.” Normally, it was Spartacus barking the orders, but right now it was Agron, because this was what'd always scared Agron about kids and their crazy driving – that someone was going to get hurt. And just because it wasn't Nasir didn't mean that Agron didn't care. His first instinct was to check and make sure the two drivers were alive, though he ignored the driver of the white car for right now. That driver obviously wouldn't need as much help. 

Somewhere in the crowd, Nasir saw the cops approach, and he'd known exactly who it was. And even now, when he should be getting out of there to keep himself out of trouble, he wasn't. He hadn't been racing tonight, just watching, and as morbid as it was, he kind of felt himself compelled to keep watching, though it wasn't just because he wanted to see if the drivers were okay.

Agron didn't notice any of that. 

Right now, his eyes and thoughts and everything was focused on this poor kid in this blue car, and how he was going to get to tell the kid's family that their son was dead because he'd been racing. He was already trying to work out the words in his head when he got to the door of the car, and bent down to look in the window. 

It took him about fifteen seconds to recognize the driver. 

Almost immediately the man'd looked familiar, and Agron'd mentally gone through a scan of everyone he'd ever arrested, and then started in on grocers and delivery boys that he'd seen, before it finally hit him like a fucking battering ram to the chest, and Agron actually had to fight to keep himself from falling over on the fucking ground, and he couldn't breath and he couldn't think and this couldn't be real and he was going to wake up in a fucking minute because there was just no way that this could be real and his mind was playing tricks on him and then a scream tore from his throat and he turned around and started towards the driver of the white car with a rage filling every single cell in his body until he felt like he was going to explode. 

It was primal and animalistic and Agron wasn't thinking like a cop or a person or an authority or any of that. He was thinking like a brother. 

His scream still hung in the air, raw and pained and angry and communicating so many things that Agron himself would never be able to say, and Nasir'd moved before he'd even been able to think about it. If he had, he might've stopped himself. What did he think he was going to do? Why would Agron listen to him, why would he stop what he was doing? But Spartacus's back was turned and he was on the radio with the ambulance and the kid getting out of the white car was bleeding from his head and was completely dazed, but Agron didn't even seem to care, and Nasir had to do _something_. 

He moved more quickly than he ever thought he could, and suddenly was placing himself in between Agron and the other driver, and reaching out to put his hand on the cop's chest with a sort of bravery that he hadn't known he had. 

“Agron.” 

There was something entirely unprofessional about calling the cop by his first name when he'd never been allowed to before, but somehow, Nasir had an instinctive knowledge that calling him 'Officer Schäffer' wouldn't have any effect. 

Calling him Agron, however, did. 

It brought him back to the situation in a way that he hadn't expected. It brought him down from the storm-cloud of rage he was riding, where nothing but his anger at the other man existed, and he couldn't see the people around him or feel the rain or hear the screams and the sirens of the approaching ambulance. Suddenly, all of that existed once again in Agron's world, and he saw the driver as a scared fucking kid who didn't realize what he'd done. It brought him back to a concerned look in Nasir's eyes, that ripped apart any defenses he'd had, and when the paramedics took the jaws of life out of their ambulance and pried Duro's mangled, nearly unrecognizable body from the wreckage, Agron did fall to the ground. 

His knees hit the pavement and the thin fabric of his uniform ripped just a little bit and his eyebrows knotted up and he couldn't breathe and he couldn't think and all he could do was scream again, the sort of sound that emanated from him haunting and terrifying and absolutely and completely devastating. He was a broken man at the moment. Not full of rage or hatred or any of that, but full of worry and fear and sadness, and Nasir fell onto the ground beside him and rested a hand on each of his shoulders and tried to pick Agron up even if he wasn't entirely certain what exactly was going on, because he didn't know who the kid who'd been so injured was. 

At least not until Agron managed to pick himself up again. 

Which didn't take very long. 

Nasir could hardly keep up with it, these shifts in Agron between utter despair and a violent sort of motion that could hardly be stopped. He wasn't sure what was going on, but he was trying to keep up with it, trying to piece it together, and mostly trying to keep Agron from getting himself into too much trouble, even if he wasn't sure why. 

“Be fucking careful!” He was yelling at the EMT now, the man who was currently sticking a needle in Duro's arm, as if that needle was the cause for all of the blood all over him. So much blood. People weren't supposed to bleed this much, and even if he'd seen gunshot wounds before and seen people bleed, this was Duro and Duro wasn't ever supposed to bleed what were they doing? 

“Officer, we're going to need his name.” The EMT was saying, trying to ignore Agron's outburst, and trying to get to the part of him that was supposed to be professional. But there was a kindness in the man's voice, a softness. He somehow thought that this man was a rookie cop and this was his first accident like this, and he could understand being a bit shaken up. “Do you have his driver's license or something?”

“Duro.” Agron answered almost automatically. “Duro Schäffer.” 

The words fell from him almost numbed as he looked down at his brother. He was still on shift, but Spartacus'd come up behind them as he said that, and looked down at the body and then shook his head, and rested a hand on Nasir's shoulder. 

“They're not going to let him in the ambulance, and I have to fill out this report. Can you take him to the hospital?” 

Which was more of a favor than he should be asking, and more of a favor than either of them had time to process, because the instant the EMT told Agron that he couldn't get in the ambulance with his brother, it was all both of them could do to wrestle him back, and it ended with Agron on the ground and Nasir pinning him and Spartacus taking away his weapon belt rather deftly, which had quickly turned into another moment of Agron falling apart beneath Nasir, and even if he would have liked to blame it on the rain there were tears on his face and there was an utter desolation to the way he managed to pick himself back up after a few minutes where Nasir just let him cry.


	7. Carry On

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nasir gives Agron a ride to the hospital, and they find a momentary catharsis.

It had taken a titanic effort to get Agron into the car. 

At first, he'd been too focused on getting into the ambulance with Duro, but after that it'd changed into a sort of gross crying, and Nasir felt his heart break for the man even if he barely knew him. But eventually, with Nasir making an effort to pull the gargantuan man to his feet and offering reassurances, Agron'd managed to pull himself together enough to get into the car. And Nasir wasn't sure where it was from, but there was blood coming from the palm of one of Agron's hands. 

Agron knew exactly where it was from. 

Or at least he would, if he stopped to think about when his hand'd hit the pavement and the asphalt had cut into him. There were still little bits of dirt and rock buried in his palm, but that was the last thing on his mind at the moment. Instead, he pulled himself from the ground and made his way to Nasir's car, and he looked almost an entirely different person than they'd seen just a moment before. 

He wasn't. 

Nasir didn't have to know him any better than he did to be able to tell. There was a stiffness in the way he moved, and a haunted look in his eyes and his brows furrowed up just a little bit in the middle in a look that was entirely too familiar to Nasir. 

Agron wasn't alright, even if he managed to get up and get himself in the car. And even in his stiff uniform, he'd managed to pull one of those long, long legs of his up until his heel rested on the seat and his knee tucked under his chin. One hand wrapped around his shin, holding onto it until his knuckles were white, and the other hand knotted itself in the front of his hair that wasn't-quite-regulation, and Nasir was pretty sure there were still silent tears running down his face. He didn't say anything though, and instead just climbed in the car, and turned the ignition and started towards the hospital. 

"Don't fucking race. Shithead." 

Agron said, and it was almost funny, but not quite. Nasir would have felt like a real dick if he'd laughed about it now anyway. 

For nearly five minutes, they drove in absolute silence. 

All Nasir could hear was the sound of the other cars speeding past them, and Agron's sniffs as snot attempted to escape his nose, snorting it all back up in a way that would have been gross if it wasn't so heartbreaking. He heard his heart pounding in his chest, and he was pretty sure that he might've been able to hear Agron's as well. 

Everything was terribly silent. 

It was deafening. 

About five minutes was all Nasir could take, though, before he reached over with one hand to start fiddling with the radio stations. Agron thought for a moment about cutting him a dirty look, and thought very strongly: _"You should keep both hands on the steering wheel,"_ but Nasir was not a mind-reader, and Agron didn't have the energy to actually say it, so it went unsaid. 

There was, unfortunately, nothing good on. 

It was the sort of Saturday night, where all of the stations that had clear reception were playing mixes that pushed songs together as if they were at a club even if they were in the car, and Nasir was absolutely certain that Agron wouldn't get as much of a kick out of his classical music as he did. Of course, there was the mandatory country station that was playing some jealous girlfriend song - probably Taylor Swift, Nasir thought in a thought he didn't even know he had - and dubstep, but ultimately nothing. 

So Nasir stopped. 

It was a channel full of static in the most offensive way possible. Like one of those old channels on analog television, where the bunny ears fell out of place and all you got was white snow falling and a crackling sound that never really came with snow. It was better than silence, though, so Nasir would take it. 

And maybe, just faintly in the background, he could hear the tune of some song, but he couldn't quite make out what it was. 

Somehow, it eased him though. 

He was just settling in for the ride when something rather unexpected happened. Apparently, whatever song'd been on in the background changed, and Agron, without ever uncurling himself from his little position, with his cheek pressed against the cold glass of the window began to head-bang. It was slow at first, almost invisible, and Nasir thought maybe for a moment that Agron was about to have a breakdown in his passenger seat. 

But then he started singing. 

It was off-key, and his voice broke with tears at first, but he was singing. 

"Once I rose above the noise and confusion..." 

And before Nasir could stop himself, he found himself joining in. 

"Just to get a glimpse beyond this illusion..." 

It was almost subconscious, the action. If you asked him the lyrics of this song at any other time, he wouldn't have known what song you were even talking about, but somehow, singing like this with Agron in the car felt as natural as walking. 

"I was soaring ever higher... " 

"But I flew too high." 

As they went through the first verse, Agron remained against the window, and his voice started out almost sotto voce, barely more than a whisper, and rose in a slow crescendo. The trembling that'd started the song was almost entirely gone, when they hit the chorus together. 

"Carry On My Wayward Son!  
There'll be peace when you are done!" 

Nasir didn't quite have time to think about it, and Agron didn't have any thoughts to think at the moment, and it was entirely instinctive. Two boys, overwhelmed with emotions they didn't know how to express, losing them in nearly screaming the lyrics to a rock-song that wasn't that hard, but was terribly emotional. They were off-key, and it was horrible and cathartic all in one big, messy bundle. 

"Don't you cry no more!" 

And when Nasir looked away from the road, his eyes met Agron's and Agron didn't even have harsh words for him for tearing his eyes off of the road. 

There weren't words now. 

There was only the song, and the singing, and the pouring out every single bit of his emotion into his awful singing that was actually hinted that maybe when he wasn't crying and distraught he might be quite a good singer, and had Nasir wondering just briefly what other talents this man might have. 

But it was only a vague sort of wondering, underscored by: 

"CARRY ON! You will always remember. CARRY ON! Nothing equals the splendor!" 

And Nasir did not dare miss his own verse. 

"Now your life's no longer empty. Surely heaven waits for you!" 

 

They pulled up to the hospital about halfway through the song, because Nasir'd been speeding and the hospital wasn't that far away, but they didn't move out of the car. Nasir turned in his seat and his eyes locked on Agron's. Even if his eyes were red and puffy from crying and he had a bit of snot glistening at the edge of his nose, in that moment where he was absolutely raw and pouring out his emotions into this song that had nothing to do with anything, he was caught by how absolutely beautiful Agron was. 

There were another few moments of quiet as the song that they'd barely heard ended, and something equally unintelligible came on, where they sat in the car with their eyes locked and the tears drying on Agron's face. It was the sort of moment that stretched out into eternity, and for a moment, they were little more than two waves of time stretching out side by side, their wave lengths lining up.

And then an ambulance, lights flashing and siren wailing, sped past them, and the moment was broken. Agron turned and got out of the car, and there would have been hell to pay if anyone attempted to stop the man now. Nasir paid the parking attendant and wondered briefly which meal this week he'd be giving up but never once considered mentioning it to Agron, and followed him inside.


	8. Beautiful Disaster

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Agron and Nasir spend some time in the waiting room, and Nasir starts to open up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry this took me so long! Hopefully the next few chapters should come more quickly.

“You’ll just have to take a seat over there while we get everything sorted.” 

The nurse behind the counter was the only person in the world as far as Agron was concerned at the moment. She was white, with dark brown curls that were laced with grays that streaked through like spider webs, and had on white scrubs that would have seemed like a bad idea if he was able to focus on that, and the world around her was white. White floors, white walls, white bodies of the pens on the desk, white papers all around her. A white computer screen with a white background on the program that listed all of the patients’ names and room numbers and maybe he was falling into a vacuum. 

To his left, there was a woman with a screaming infant who had an ear infection, and beside her a husband with a diaper bag who looked like he hadn’t slept in three weeks, but Agron didn’t see them. There were people asleep in some of the chairs in the waiting room, and a couple of kids were playing video games in the corner while their mother absently did a crossword, entirely distracted, but Agron didn’t notice her either. 

There was only this woman. With her spider web hair and red lips that curved into a smile. 

It was supposed to be calming. 

Somewhere, some vague part of his brain, buried deep in the back, recognized this. 

Instead, it looked to him like poison. 

Everything that was poisonous was red. Red berries were poison. Red veins in leaves were poison. Red frogs, red bugs. Red was poison. It was an instinctive reaction, bred into the human species way back in the hunter gatherer days, when they had to avoid trouble. It was why stop signs were red and stop lights were red, and why cars that were red got pulled over far more often. Red was poison. 

“What do you mean, have a seat?” He asked, his voice cracking and scratching in his throat. 

“There’s a lot of paperwork to be done, and your brother can’t have visitors until we have him stabilized. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to wait. I’ll let you know as soon as we can let you in.” 

“That’s – That’s my brother back there, and you want me to just sit down in some chair over here like – like – “ 

He didn’t know what it was like though. 

Impotent. 

Useless. 

His brother could be dying, and he was being told to just calm down and have a seat. It was unthinkable.   
“Agron. Come on.” 

Nasir wasn’t sure what good he was going to do. They had something of a rapport between them, and yet it was vague and unestablished, and when he put his hand on Agron’s arm, he half expected the cop to turn around and slug him in the face out of a gut reaction. It was the sort of thing Nasir might’ve been tempted to do if their situations were reversed; he wouldn’t have blamed him at all. His own voice was weary even if it had no right to be. 

Agron didn’t punch him though. He turned to look at him, but even that was only in a vague sort of sense, because there was absolutely no way to really say that Agron was seeing anything. There was a distant look in his eyes, and Nasir was certain that if this had been some sort of show with lots of special effects, he would be able to see Duro’s mangled face in the pupils of the taller man’s eyes. It wasn’t, but Nasir still knew they were there. 

He knew the feeling. 

For the next two hours, he just let Agron pace back and forth. There were lines on the floor, and at first it just started out as him thinking about walking back up to the desk to check how things were going and then realizing that he shouldn’t. Then it became a blind sort of action. Anything to keep moving, because if he sat still, Agron wasn’t sure he’d be able to get up at this point; it felt like all of the blood had drained out of his limbs and wanted to pool in the bottom of his stomach until he was sick all over the floor and the chairs and Nasir and everything, and the only way to keep the blood in the proper places was to keep moving. About the last thirty minutes or so though, the pacing wasn’t anything but pacing. It was an idle action brought on by muscle memory as Agron’s thoughts began to wander back towards his brother, and the sight he’d seen in the car. 

Duro’s face was mutilated. 

His eyes were swollen shut, and there was blood pouring down from somewhere on his head and cuts and bruises and his nose was probably broken in at least one place if not more from the impact and the airbags. There’d already been a sickly green tone to his skin from a loss of blood by the time Agron got there, and he was pretty sure that that stupid little nose ring he insisted on wearing had been ripped out at some point during it all. 

It was a rough crash. Agron had seen many during his stint with the force, and some worse than this one, but that didn’t change the fact that it was a rough crash, and he couldn’t help but try to mentally categorize all of the wounds he’d seen even if he wasn’t a doctor. 

That was when Nasir’d started to get worried, because as the action became more repetitive and his thoughts took him farther away, the blood started draining out of Agron’s own face until he was pale as a ghost and his eyes were rimmed with an unhealthy sort of red despite the fact that he hadn’t cried in the two hours they’d been here. 

“It’s scary, isn’t it?” 

His voice was stronger than he’d thought it’d be, as he looked up at Agron, who did not stop pacing, or give any real indication that he heard him. Nasir knew he had though. He could see it in the way that Agron’s hands at his sides clenched and trembled all at the same time. He knew that feeling. That anger, mixed with that same helplessness; there was no way he couldn’t recognize it. 

“My brother was in the hospital a couple of years ago. This same one actually. He was my older brother, but I felt like he was the only family I really had. The only one who understood me at least. I remember standing there when they told me that I couldn’t go see them, and even though I knew it wasn’t her fault I just wanted to scream at the nurse.” 

Agron finally stopped pacing. Nasir let out a breath he hadn’t even known he’d been holding and continued his story. 

“I wasn’t sure I was going to make it through all of the waiting. In my head, I just kept replaying all of the situations where things could go wrong, or what he could be going through without me. I can’t even list all of the things that went through my head...” 

Nasir looked down at his fingers, as if there was something under his fingernails that was suddenly very interesting, and he began to pick at them, the edges of his fingers riddled with more hangnails than he liked to admit, and in the areas where there weren’t hangnails, he made new ones as often as not. His attention only lingered there for a moment, though, before he found his gaze drawn back up to Agron, running from his trembling hands up the lengths of his arms and finally to where his jaw met his neck in an undefined sort of line of his jaw and neck that really should have been a deterrent, but just couldn’t be when his face showed so much emotion. 

For a short moment, his breath caught in his chest. 

It was the most awful thought he’d ever had, but standing there and looking down at him, with his eyes ringed red and his brow furrowed until it looked like his face might actually break at any moment, all Nasir could think of was that Agron looked devastatingly, heartbreakingly beautiful. 

“It all turned out okay though,” He lied, reaching up to grab onto the edge of Agron’s sleeve almost like a child, in a desperate attempt to get him to sit down. “And if your brother’s half as stubborn as you, I’m sure he’ll be fine.” 

“He’s more stubborn.” 

The answer came without a pause, and Agron nearly fell onto the chair beside Nasir, the corners of his mouth beginning to wiggle in what might have been hysterical laughter that never even got a chance to escape. No sooner had his ass hit the chair, with all of the tingling sensations normally saved for sleeping limbs, than the woman behind the counter was standing up, with a yellow visitor badge on her finger. 

“Officer Schäfer? You can go see your brother now.”


	9. How to Save A Life

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Agron sees Duro in the hospital for the first time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This scene was supposed to be on the end of the last chapter, but that one seemed to wrap itself up so nicely. I thought I could put this at the beginning of what was supposed to be posted today, but then this kind of took on a life of its own. I'm sorry I keep dragging this out so long! 
> 
>  (Will you forgive me if I promise you there will be kissing and sex relatively soon?)

BUZZZZZZ. 

There was a metallic click of the door unlocking and the heavy sound of it closing behind Agron as he disappeared down the hallway, his shoulders slumped and that broad expanse of back stretching his uniform into the most desolate image of defeat. Nasir looked after him as he walked away with a furrowed brow that made him look a lot like a kicked puppy or maybe like his heart was breaking for the cop who’d arrested him twice and was really a the best man he’d ever known. It seemed like the seconds stretched into minutes into hours, and yet Agron was barely making the first turn before Nasir had turned to the Nurse behind the desk and given her the best of his pathetic looks. 

“Can I go with him?” 

She looked up from her paperwork and gave him a sympathetic look. “No, I’m sorry, dear. Only family’s allowed right now.” 

Nasir hesitated only a moment, drawing his lower lip between his teeth, biting on it and casting another glance at the large metal doors that separated the waiting room from the actual hospital rooms. He looked absolutely forlorn and devastated, and he knew it. 

“Please? Look, I know it’s not conventional. I know. And I know I’m asking you to do something that might get you in trouble, but - “His voice cracked, and Nasir thought he maybe deserved an Emmy, except that he was really kind of torn up so it wasn’t all acting, “We’re not officially family, but he’s the closest thing I’ve got. And we would be, you know. If it weren’t – I just want to be with my partner while he goes through this. His brother means more to him than anything. Please. Please don’t keep me from being able to go back there because of some stupid political thing, because we’ve been together for years now, and we’d be married if it weren’t for that and just – please?” 

He sounded like he might break at any moment, and even if the nurse knew that she shouldn’t let him in - that it was unprofessional, she just couldn’t let him suffer. 

“Alright, alright, calm down.” She said softly, reaching for the too-big black sharpie and another visitor’s badge. “But I don’t know how you got this, alright?”

It was nearly a whisper; she obviously didn’t want anyone else overhearing, but she handed him the sticker anyway, and Nasir didn’t care at all if it had to be a secret. It was exponentially important that he be with Agron through this – that Agron not have to go through this alone. 

And it was probably a good thing, because when Agron got to the door of the hospital room, that same sterile white seeming to take over everything (the curtain between the beds was actually green, but it was a pale green, one that almost matched Agron’s eyes, and he didn’t notice that), he nearly collapsed in the doorway. His shoulder hit into the metal of the frame with a bruising force. He didn’t even feel it. His attention was elsewhere. 

Duro looked so small in that bed. 

He was tucked away under a million blankets, barely more than a pile on the bed. There were stitches above his eye intersecting with his eyebrow, and his lip was busted. There was still swelling under his eye and burns from the airbag on the side of his face that wasn’t covered in a million green and purple and red cuts. Too many machines were hooked up to him to even begin counting, and there was a steady beeping in the background that felt like it was ripping Agron apart with every single silence and breathing life back into him with every single beep. Under all of the colors of bruises and cuts and stitches and burns, Duro’s skin was a deathly pallor. 

Agron couldn’t even tell if he was awake or asleep, and he felt his knees going weak under him, because _Duro wasn’t supposed to look like that_. A strangled sort of sound escaped him before he could help it, soft and barely audible except for the fact that everything else around them was so quiet. It was what woke Duro up. 

Or maybe he was always awake. Opening his eyes took a concentrated effort though, and they barely seemed to want to focus on Agron. He turned his head towards them, rustling against the too stiff pillow case, but it was accompanied by a wince, and Duro, who was always full of fire and determination and laughter and joy had tears slipping from the corners of his eyes for reasons he couldn’t place – pain or fear or something entirely unknown. Every single motion took almost more strength than he could manage, but as Duro looked at his big brother standing in the doorway, looking like he might break apart at any moment, he forced a smile even if it hurt and cracked open his busted lip just enough that he tasted of blood beginning to fill his mouth. 

“Sie Ohnmacht beim Anblick von Blut? Ich dachte, ich sollte eigentlich die Schwachen sein.” He quirked the injured eyebrow up enough to seem cavalier, but it didn’t quite work with all of the cuts on his face. It was gone more quickly than it’d appeared. “Ficken Frau.” 

_You faint at the sight of blood? And I thought I was supposed to be the weak one. Fucking woman.”_

It was only when Duro spoke that the doctor who’d been going over his chart looked up from what he was doing to see Agron standing there. It was almost more like seeing a blur, because one moment the man was collapsed against the door frame, and the next he was beside the bed with the chair pulled up close and scraping against the floor, his hand grasping tightly onto the hand of his brother. Agron ignored all of the wires coming out of it and the fact that he might be hurting Duro, and squeezed. He held on tightly for all that he was worth. Maybe if he held on tight enough, he could keep his little brother here in this world solely through the power of his grip. His mouth was dry. He could have sworn after earlier that he had no more tears left to cry, but as he reached up to push a stray dred back out of his brother’s face with a gentleness that was almost overwhelming for someone of his size, the leaked from his own eyes as well until his cheeks were soaked. 

“Oh, thank god. You’re his brother?” The doctor wasn’t trying to be harsh. He wasn’t. He understood on some level how difficult this must be, but he also saw it at least five times a day. There were other patients waiting and he couldn’t just stand around they had their reunion. “He’s got a concussion, and he seems to have forgotten how to speak English at the moment. Is there anything you can tell us?” 

From there, they began going through the basic paperwork. There were so many questions Duro couldn’t answer that he should have been able to answer, and there was a moment during it where Duro grabbed his hand in return, and asked Agron why they were speaking English, and Agron felt something inside him break a little bit when he had to remind Duro that they’d moved to America ten years ago. 

That was nothing, though, compared to the next time Duro squeezed his hand. 

Agron was just getting to the fact that there were no medicines that Duro was allergic to and had only been answering questions for about thirty seconds when Duro’s voice sounded again. It was cracking and weak and the exact same voice he’d used so long ago to ask Agron to fight away the monsters that hid in his closet. “Agron…” He looked up at his brother with big brown eyes that were too big and too brown for anyone’s good, really, and asked with an innocence that belied the fact that he’d landed himself in this hospital bed, “Wo sind wir?” 

_Where are we?_

Agron had to choke back tears and bent down to press a kiss to his brother’s forehead. _“We’re in the hospital, Duro. You’ve had an accident.”_

_“Is everyone okay?”_

The amount of concern in his voice only worked to see Agron further undone, and even if it wasn’t really his place, Nasir made his way over to where the brothers huddled and rested his hand on Agron’s shoulder. 

_“Yes, everyone’s going to be fine.”_

_“Why does my head hurt?”_

_“You bumped it in the accident. The airbag got you good. You kind of look like a pizza face.”_

The statement made Duro laugh, but only for a moment before he nearly doubled over from the pain of it. Tears streamed down his face, and his brows did this impossible thing where they furrowed so much that they nearly turned upside down. 

“Shh, shhh, shh…” Agron practically cooed, pushing Duro back onto the bed and trying to look like he wasn’t scared as shit that Duro was hurting so much. It was a failed attempt; his heartbreak showed on every single inch of him. It radiated through the room until Nasir felt like he couldn’t breathe. 

“Be careful.” The doctor warned, picking up his chart and looking it over. “He’s got a few broken ribs and a punctured lung that we’re going to need to operate on; don’t make him laugh.” 

For all of his sternness, the doctor might as well have been almost a hat-stand for the amount of attention that Agron paid him. It was Nasir who nodded at that and tightened his grip on Agron’s shoulder. “We’ll be careful.” 

The promise had barely passed Nasir’s lips though, before Duro was speaking again, reaching up to run his hand through his hair and wincing at that as well. There was blood still on his arm, and Agron was pretty sure that was a bone sticking out. It wasn’t. It was a bit of medical tape, but Agron wasn’t seeing clearly enough to realize that and felt his stomach give a definite lurch. _”What’s this on my arm?”_

Agron licked his lips, but his mouth was too dry for it to do any good. 

_”That’s your iv.”_

_“IV?”_

_“Yeah. For your pain meds.”_

_“Why am I on pain meds? Agron, my head really hurts.”  
“You’re on pain meds because you got in a car accident.” _

Duro nearly came up off the bed again in a jolt of fear. His eyes were as wild as those of a trapped animal when he looked at Agron, wide and fearful and entirely uncomprehending. 

_”I got in an accident?! Is everyone okay?”_

That. 

That was when Agron’s heart really broke in his chest. The fear in Duro’s eyes – the way he was clinging to Agron’s hand as if Agron was the only thing real in the world – was enough to break his heart into a million little pieces. He wasn’t sure how he was going to survive this. He was supposed to keep Duro safe. 

_“Yeah. Everyone’ll be fine.”_ He replied again, the words feeling almost hollow slipping through his throat. As intense as his gaze was when he looked at Duro, though, it was equally intense when he turned to look at the doctor. It was the sort of gaze that really should have been scary. Agron himself was half-wild right now with fear and worry, like a feral animal kept in a cage. 

“Why can’t he remember anything?”

It was more of a demand than a question. The words bounced off of the walls around them, too loud for their setting, but Nasir understood. 

“That’s from the concussion.” The doctor was casual about it all, which only made Agron want to throttle him. Maybe if someone beat his head against the wall until he had a concussion – “He should hopefully get his memory back soon. Short term memory loss tends to be a very fleeting thing.” 

It wasn’t exactly reassuring, but the doctor didn’t even seem to stop, and just continued on with his questions. He didn’t offer Agron a break or a cup of water. He just continued to do his job. “Now, if we can get back to these questions – “ 

But it wasn’t really a question in itself, and the doctor launched back into them without giving Agron so much as two minutes to think about it.


	10. Crash and Burn

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took longer than I said it would!

The instant the doctor was finished with the questions, Nasir and Agron had both been shown the door. Something about running tests or doing blood work or – Agron didn’t really know. He could only halfway focus on listening to the doctor, because the other half of him was focused on the terrified look on Duro’s face and the fact that no matter what he did, Agron couldn’t fix this.

They’d walked out the door. They’d turned left. That was all Agron really knew for the first few minutes, as they walked along a relatively empty, sterile hallway. The sounds of machines beeping came from several of the rooms. TVs buzzed in the background, an almost morbid mixture of songs from SpongeBob and The Wiggles and the daily news, which was covering a major crash that’d happened on I—20 tonight. Nothing was really defined in Agron’s head; it all sounded like the irritating hum of a mosquito lingering around your ear, waiting to bite. It was only Nasir who really realized what was going on in the world around them, and there was one point where they were walking along the hallway where he’d had to grab Agron by the arm, and pull him out of the way of a little old lady in a wheelchair dragging her IV pole behind her. 

It was aimless.

Nasir didn’t know what to do except follow Agron and try to stay as close as possible. In this moment, it was abundantly clear how little they knew of each other. It didn’t matter that there was an inescapable pull between them or that they’d first met each other several months ago, when it came to something like offering Agron comfort? He had no idea where to even begin. So instead he just followed him along the hallway and through the corridors as if Agron was some restless tumbleweed and Nasir a bit of string and feathers caught up in its branches. He wasn’t sure how long they walked like that. It felt like an hour, but minutes felt like hours in this place, and he vaguely wondered if maybe hospitals weren’t some sort of alternate Narnia where instead of becoming kings and queens they were instead left to stand face to face with their own mortality.

Eventually though, they stopped.

Or Agron stopped, and Nasir very nearly ran straight into his back and had to put a hand out in front of himself to keep his nose from ramming smack into a wall of spinal column and muscle. 

At first, he wasn’t sure why they’d stopped. They weren’t quite in a waiting room, but there was a corner with a vending machine and chairs on either side of them. Agron’s eyes were fixed on the vending machine, as if it held some sort of mystical answer. Maybe Agron was Indiana Jones, and one of those pieces of candy was the Holy Grail. That was kind of what it looked like from the look on his face. 

Oh. 

Somehow, it hadn’t even occurred to Nasir that Agron might be the type of person who took comfort from eating. It was stereotypical and calloused, but he’d somehow thought that maybe Agron didn’t even eat sweets due to his physique. (Which meant admitting that he’d thought about Agron’s physique, at least in his own mind, but how could he help it, really? Even if this was a really inopportune time to be facing that knowledge. It was like a giggle loop, but with inappropriate thoughts instead - building up on top of each other and getting stronger each time he tried to push them down.) 

“Candy?” 

“Candy. Rolos.” 

The first word was in answer to his question. The next was a statement. 

The sound of the coins slipping through the machine seemed obscenely loud. Once Agron had the candy in his hand though, he turned halfway, until he could see Nasir and Nasir could see his face in that three-quarters profile that was so popular with classical artists. 

“Do you want anything?” 

A pregnant pause. 

“Some skittles would be great.” 

Agron nodded, and then Nasir was looking at his back again and vaguely wondering in the back of his head how soft those baby-fine hairs running just below his hair cut on his neck were, and what they’d feel like if he ran his fingers through them. 

Once they both had their candy in hand, they sat down on the chairs beside the machine, and sort of stared off into space. Sort of, because every few minutes, Nasir’d find his gaze drawn back to Agron, and the way his thumb fiddled with the end of his candy wrapper but never really opened it, and Agron’d find his gaze pulled away from the candy he’d gotten simply because it was Duro’s favorite and redirected up at Nasir, and the solid, straight lines of his face. He felt his breath catch in his chest several times when they made eye contact, and his mouth ran dry. 

Who was this kid? 

Why was he being so nice? 

But those were just an oversimplification of thoughts that included words like _perfect_ and possibly _guardian angel_ , and Agron tried to slow his thoughts by speaking again. 

“I hate Rolos.” 

Nasir looked up at him, and he felt his heart skip a beat in his chest. Subconsciously, his tongue came out and ran across his lips. Nasir’s eyes followed it. 

“They’re Duro’s favorite, but I hate them.” 

The words were almost confessional, spoken in a low tone of voice that had Nasir leaning closer to better understand him. A strand of hair escaped over Nasir’s ear, hanging low beside his face before Nasir pushed it back, and Agron was entranced. 

“Do you want some skittles?” 

When he held up the bag to offer out the candy, Agron just nodded as he took it. This time, when their fingers brushed, neither of them pulled back immediately and a lingering sense of heat coursed through both of them. There was a pause: Agron’s hand remained for just a beat longer than it should have, and Nasir’s eyebrow quirked upwards as he looked at him. Neither gaze wavered. Not until Agron took the bag from Nasir’s hand, and poured what was easily half of the candy into his hand first, and then straight into his mouth, bypassing any sort of decency or good manners in favor of getting the sugar into his system. 

For a moment, Nasir wondered if, if they offered him an injection of simple syrup, would Agron say no? 

His eyes were fixed on Agron - on the movement of his jaw up and down, bulging in and out as he chewed a massive hunk of skittles. There was a beauty in the strength of it, in the way his mouth moved, even if the sides poked out a little bit like a chipmunk with so much candy, and Nasir couldn’t pull his gaze away, even if he knew he should. But Agron bore no complaints. He looked straight forward at first, chewing as if lost in thought. That lasted only a minute, before he found his gaze being pulled back over to Nasir, and the way his eyes danced in the light. 

There was a softness to him, and a sharpness, and if it weren’t for the juice of the candy filling his mouth, he was pretty sure it’d be dry again. 

For a long moment, they were caught there. Their eyes met, and the noises of the hospital faded even further from their existence, until only the two of them existed in a vacuum, drawn by magnets towards each other. They were twin stars, caught in an endless orbit, constantly drawing closer and closer, and yet trying desperately to stay apart, because colliding would unquestionably prove catastrophic. 

Nasir lifted a hand, and tucked a strand of hair back behind his ear. 

Agron shifted his weight from one side of his butt to the other, until he was minutely closer to the other man. 

Nasir exhaled. 

Agron inhaled. 

And then it was all for naught, because before either of them really knew what was happening, they were both out of their seats and crashing against each other with the sort of force and desperation usually reserved for porno or Lifetime movies. Their lips met with a heat that had been eons in the building, moving against each other in a primal, unreserved dance that only they seemed to know the steps of. It should have been awkward; it was a first kiss, and Nasir wasn’t even sure Agron was gay, but he tasted like skittles and sweetness and something entirely his own, and Nasir was helpless to resist. 

Agron was a ferocious kisser. His lips and teeth and tongue all explored greedily, and Nasir quickly found his back pressed against the wall, with Agron all around him. It could have easily been overwhelming; Agron as bigger than him in every sense of the word, and Nasir was quite literally enveloped in him, wrapped in his body, in his scent, in his kisses. He found it freeing. When Agron pulled his lip between his teeth, Nasir reached up and grabbed at those hairs he’d been considering so carefully earlier and tugged his head back towards him forcefully. There were hands on either side of his head, but his own were free to explore, even as his mouth was entirely taken over by Agron. Give and take.

Agron kissed him as if all of the answers to the world’s problems might be found in his mouth. Might be found in the nutty, rich and slightly exotic flavor that was entirely Nasir, and the way their tongues moved against each other, and Nasir’s body curled to his on instinct. 

It was sloppy and wet, and so full of _need_ , and it was the best kiss either of them had ever had in their entire lives. 

As long as they had each other like this, they could forget that they were in a hospital, hidden only slightly by the vending machine beside them. There could be nothing in the world except each other, and the way their bodies reacted as if they’d been made for this very thing. 

The kiss broke, Agron pulling away for a hasty breath of air, a string of spit still connecting their mouths, before they were crashing against each other once again, and Nasir was moaning some sort of curse into Agron’s mouth while Agron huffed hot air against his cheek. 

“The doctor’s left. You can go see your brother now.” 

It ended just as quickly as it’d begun, with Agron pulling away when the nurse made her announcement and leaving Nasir behind to struggle in the wake of such a kiss. There were just a few moments where Agron walked away from him and Nasir remained as he was, with his back pressed against the wall and his chest heaving, casting a glance up at the heavens to pray to whatever gods might listen for reasons he didn’t even fully understand. 

And then he caught up to Agron and laced their fingers together, giving his hand a squeeze of solidarity as they walked back into the room that held his brother.


	11. I'm With the Ashes Now

Duro was asleep.

There was the beeping of machines and the whirr of engines and the room was full of activity and life as the doctor and nurses bustled in and out, but Duro was immune to it all. His face was still swollen, and one blackened eye leaked tears and crusted around the edges, and Agron reached up several times to wipe the crust away, but Duro slept through it all.

It was probably for the best. He needed to sleep. But as he slept Agron took up a solid vigil beside him, his hand reaching out to wrap around Duro's own hand and squeezing tightly. Had he been thinking entirely clearly, he might've realized that squeezing Duro's hand might be injuring it; the airbag had erupted right on top of Duro's hands, and the backs of them bore tell-tale burns, but right now Agron wasn't thinking clearly, and was only thinking about being close to his little brother. For about a half an hour, they sat there in silence that was deafening.

Nasir couldn't even feel his thoughts. He was beginning to think that maybe he'd lost the ability to hear anything other than the beep of machines, when he did hear something. Something low and out of key under Agron's breath and the scrape of a chair as Agron moved closer still, until his knees were colliding with the edge of Duro's hospital bed.

_“Say your prayers,_  
 _little one_  
 _don't forget my son_  
 _to include everyone …”_

They were there for another hour and a half, sitting beside the bed and waiting to see if Duro woke up, but there were only so many times Agron could sing off-key Metallica before his voice began to crack and scratch and sound even worse than it already had.

There were only so many times Nasir could listen to it before his heart broke.

They didn't have to say a word. It was around three in the morning when Agron looked up at Nasir, and Nasir caught his eye. One glance at the door, followed by a lingering gaze and a heavy swallow, and there was absolutely no need for words. They picked themselves up from their seats, Agron taking a few moments to press first a kiss to the back of Duro's bruised and burned knuckles and then to his forehead, and to whisper that he'd see him tomorrow, and then they walked out of the room. The corridors of the hospital became nothing short of a blur as they made their way to the car, and Agron reached for Nasir's GPS without question, plugging in the address to his flat.

The ride home was made in a similar sort of silence: palpable and raw.

There were stairs somewhere between the car and the apartment, but Nasir couldn't remember them.

His back hit the wall with a hard and bruising force, but Nasir couldn't breathe enough to care. He sucked Agron's lip into his mouth, his tongue kneading at the sensative flesh, and an obscene moan escaping him as he tugged Agron closer.

It was primal. Agron acted on passion, pushing against Nasir harder and more completely until there wasn't a single inch of them that wasn't pressed together. Until even through their clothing, Nasir could imagine how it'd feel to have Agron inside him, buried up to the core and thrusting with wild abandon.

Lips and teeth laid claim to Nasir's mouth. Hands explored, tugged at Nasir's hair as he pulled his mouth away from Nasir's neck to trail along his jawline, sucking on sensitive bits of flesh. Nasir's hands pulled him closer, hooking onto the muscles and bones of his hips and tugging him closer until pain shot through them both as their hipbones collided. Neither of them seemed to care.

There was nothing but the feel of lips and the press of skin - a desperate hunger for more, more, always more.

Nasir felt his chest heave with wanting, breathing harder than he'd ever imagined as Agron's lips trailed their way down to his neck, and left a bruising claim. They were everywhere all at once, nipping at his earlobe and then kissing along the swell of the glands along the side; dragging teeth over the muscle as he turned his head to one side and then lapping with his tongue and making apology with kisses that were too soft to be as heated as they were.

Neither of them were entirely sure who'd removed who's shirt first. There was a flurry, and clothes fell to the floor without thought. Agron's lips pulled away from Nasir's neck in a moment that was agonizingly painful, but only a flutter of moments passed before they were shirtless, their chests pressed together and their hips moving in a rhythm that was not defined by anything but their own overwhelming need. Despite their desperation, they managed to find each other's erections through their clothing, arching and pressing together, and creating a friction only intensified by the fabric between them.

The apartment filled with the sounds of their moans, their voices as strained as their pants as they ground their hips against together and pulled each other closer.

And then their pants were gone, and a condom was produced from somewhere – probably somewhere in someone's wallet and both of them had the good sense to wonder if perhaps it was out of date - and they were fucking hard and heavy and fast against the wall, with Nasir's legs wrapped around Agron and one of Agron's arms underneath him for added support while another wrapped around his cock and pumped him in time with every single thrust. His cock throbbed, and he could feel every beat of Nasir's heart as he fucked him, ruled only by a need to be closer and closer and the pounding of his body against Nasir's own. The sound of flesh against flesh filled the apartment, and Agron's own breathing became a labored mix of gasps for air and curses in both German and English. Nasir's nails dug into his shoulders as he held onto him, the thighs of his muscles contracting and trembling as he pushed up and down to fuck himself on Agron's cock.

When they came, it was with cries that filled the air around them and would garner Agron complaints from the neighbors, filling the condom and spilling all over their stomachs. Cum clung to the coarse hairs that ran from Agron's stomach to his cock as Nasir clung onto him, kissing along his collar bone in hopes that it would offer some sort of respite.

There was a refractory period, that was filled with kisses and touches, exploring every bit of each other's bodies. Agron fell to his knees before Nasir and buried his nose in the hairs at the base of the cock and inhaled his scent. They teased and touched. Agron discovered that when he kissed behind Nasir's ear, the man made a mewling sound that made his own cock throb, and Nasir discovered that Agron loved the feel of nails scraping up along his ass. They kneaded at sensitive muscles and traced a million trails with their tongues against each other's skins in an effort to memorize patterns that might make a difference in some undisclosed future.

It was worship of each other's bodies, and it was the sort of distraction that left no room for thoughts of Duro, or the hope that Agron wouldn't be left alone when all of this was over.

And then they fucked again. They fucked against the kitchen counter, loudly and messily, preambled with tongues and fingers that made Nasir come undone and made him feel like Agron might think more of him than he thought of any god they'd ever encountered. Agron plied him with is fingers until Nasir was begging and needy, his body writhing and aching for contact before he was filled again. They left a mess that Nasir'd vaguely tried to clean up with the dish towel on the sink before abandoning it for lost as Agron pulled him away and covered his mouth again with a sort of kiss that was lost to all meaning except for a need to feel some sort of contact.

They should have showered then.

They were both sticky and covered in each other's cum, and they were running out of condoms, but they didn't, and instead they made their way, with kisses and stumbling and laughing at their own clumsiness to the sofa. Nasir thought for one brief moment that he should have asked for a tour, but the thought was lost in the feel of Agron's lips against his own and a taste that was laced with the flavor of coffee and donuts, sweet and bitter all at the same time and underscored by something entirely Agron's own, and he couldn't have cared less if Agron lived on the moon as long as he kept kissing him like that.

And if they fucked against the wall and against the kitchen counter, when they got past the kissing and the touching and the adoration that made up their experience on the sofa, it could only be described as love-making. Agron's hands sought Nasir's and clasped together above their heads. He kissed him with a tenderness that was previously unknown. Their bodies moved as one to create a rhythm rather than moving to meet one set by an individual, and their eyes met as they pressed against and into each other. It was calm and measured and slower than what they'd done previously, marked by their expense so far and their mutual need for something more than a desperate fuck against the cold stone of the wall or the hard surface of the counter. The kisses they exchanged then were more lingering, and when they came it was with eye contact and a tightening of the grip they held on each other's hands.

But the kisses and the fucking and the love-making didn't cease then. They continued, as if there was nothing more important. Their closeness was more imperative than the very air they breathed. They didn't stop for food or water or respite until there was no other option.

They didn't stop until they were collapsed against each other on the sofa, passed out, with Agron's knees thrown over the edge and Nasir's hand hitting the floor where it dangled, and Agron could smell Nasir's hairsoap and it smelled lovely and a little bit like oil and he found it comforting in all the chaos that surrounded him.

For one very brief moment in which he clung to the very edges of conciousness, Agron thought he was in love with this man.

And then sleep overtook them both.


	12. All Those Little Things

It was two weeks before Duro got out of the hospital. 

Two weeks, and Nasir only went home twice – both times because he felt the sort of need for clean underwear that could no longer be satisfied by simply doing without. 

The first day was rough. 

Nasir woke up before Agron, who was far more emotionally and physically exhausted, and pried his way out of arms that wrapped too tightly around him and fought against soft, mewling pleas in his ear to keep him in place. It was all too tempting to stay: there was the warmth of Agron at his back and a secure feeling wrapped up in his arms, but there was also a distinct ache forming in his lower back and a crick in his neck from sleeping unprepared on the sofa, and ultimately it was his growling stomach that propelled him from the sofa. 

The cold of the hardwood floors nearly made him yelp, and he actually bit the inside of his lip to keep himself quiet, tossing a look back over his shoulder at Agron who looked so peaceful when he was sleeping that it was hard to reconcile that image with the man who growled and spit fire when he was angry and awake. The last thing he wanted to do was wake him up. Not when he might actually be getting the first real sleep he'd had in – well, who knew how long. Nasir didn't. Not really. He was just going off of what he'd heard about cops and their never sleeping. So he bit his lip to keep from yelping and tugged an elastic from his wrist and twisted his hair up in the laziest of buns atop his head, not caring where it spilled and escaped. 

Because the first and most pressing concern was quite obviously breakfast. 

Already, his mind was filling with all sorts of things he could make; it dawned on him on the relatively short walk that neither of them had actually bothered eating anything all night. Agron was sure to be just as starving as he was when he woke up, and he wasn't exactly sure why, but he felt a certain amount of domesticity that he had no right to in the idea of cooking breakfast. It made him smile. 

But when he opened the fridge, all of those warm, fuzzy thoughts were dashed to hell, carried in a hand-basket made of expired milk and some sort of vaguely pie-shaped thing and a whole lot of nothing else. 

By the time Agron woke up, Nasir'd cleaned out the fridge of it's mysterious and possibly hazardous contents and made his way down to the market to pick up a few basic necessities – like a loaf of bread and some peanut butter. They had peanut butter toast in silence that morning, sitting side by side at the kitchen counter with their knees bumping against each other every few seconds. 

Agron only ate two bites before he got up and threw the rest out. 

“I'm not hungry.” He admitted, pausing to glance at the clock on the microwave, and then looking back at Nasir, who's brow furrowed and scrunched together in the middle until Agron just wanted to kiss away the worry-wrinkles there. “And you'll get wrinkles making that face.” 

It was a dry joke, one without much humor in it, but Nasir recognized it for what it was and forced a smile at the man. It might've been easier to take an iron to his face to straighten out all the creases. “Haha. Very funny. I'm pretty sure you'll get wrinkles before me.” 

Agron just gave him a look, and Nasir wished he'd tease back but counted it a success that he was teasing at all. 

When they went to see Duro, Nasir had to remind Agron to shower first. He did so gently, with calm, soft hands pulling him towards the newly-discovered bathroom and it's clinking pipes and soft kisses that trailed along one admittedly slightly stinky shoulder. It hadn't exactly been a _bad_ reminder. They spent the time equally fawning each other in attention, with Nasir continuing the coaxing by lathering up the poof ball (and reserving jokes about Agron having a poof ball for later, when things weren't quite so somber) and then beginning to carefully wash Agron, and Agron using Duro's shampoo (because Duro bought the sort that smelled like coconuts and wood and was far more healthy, while Agron bought whatever-was-cheapest, Suave or some shit) lathered up Nasir's hair and ran his fingers through it, working out any sort of knots with devotion. It was almost ritualistic. They'd fucked last night several times, but they hadn't actually taken the time to get to know each other's bodies. Nasir hadn't noticed that little mole on Agron's arm, and Agron hadn't noticed the little curls that formed at the base of his head amidst all of Nasir's straight hair. 

“Fuck...” Agron'd groaned, pressing his forehead against Nasir's when the drop in water temperature cut their exploration short, and Nasir just laughed softly, and leaned up to press a kiss to the corner of Agron's lips rather teasingly. 

“Come on.” he said, as he pulled himself out of the shower and reached for two towels that were actually far softer and nicer than he'd expected in this ultimate bachelor pad sort of apartment. “Let's go see your brother.” 

The Schafer brothers together were a heartbreaking sight. 

Nasir wasn't entirely sure why he was here, except to offer Agron emotional support, because Duro didn't know who he was and kept asking – not that Nasir really knew what he was saying, because he was still speaking in all German, but it was easy enough to pick it up when Agron kept saying his name. He didn't know what else they talked about though. He didn't know how they joked or bantered – though he did know that they did. They laughed, and elbowed each other, and at one point Agron shoved Duro over until he was sitting on the bed behind his little brother with the younger man's head resting on his chest in a move that looked silly and awful all at the same time. 

_“What the fuck, Agron. I'm not a kid anymore.”_

_“Obviously you are, getting yourself in this stupid situation because you're chasing thrills.”_

Duro'd rolled his eyes at that, and then winced and hissed because rolling his eyes was painful, and Agron just squeezed him more tightly until Duro coughed and elbowed him in the ribcage. 

_“You'll kill me faster than any fucking hospital.”_ he grumbled, before reaching out for the remote, and not quite making it because he couldn't bend forward that far, and then his eyes fell on Nasir, who happened to be sitting mere inches away from the remote control. _“Can you turn on the tv?”_

It was when Nasir gave him a confused look that Duro lost it again. It wasn't a violent sort of losing it like Agron's had been, it was more quiet and more contained, and instead of screaming or crying, he just crumpled back onto Agron. There was a hunted, lost look in his eyes like a little child abandoned in the woods and afraid of the dark. 

_“Agron...”_

And Agron shook his head and pressed a kiss to the back of Duro's dreds. _“No, Duro. We're not watching Days of Our Lives.”_

He avoided mentioning how Duro couldn't speak English yet. It wasn't the sort of thing he had words for. 

They spent most of the day there, with Nasir feeling more and more useless the longer they did. 

On the way back to the apartment, they stopped by the grocery store, where Nasir did most of the shopping with Agron only throwing in the occasional thing and then paying for whatever it was they purchased without much of a second thought. He gave the cashier the sort of smile that was vacant and hardly there, and when they got back to the flat he channel surfed aimlessly while Nasir fixed them both up a quick meal of meatloaf and a desert of chocolate pudding because he was thoroughly convinced that chocolate pudding made every single thing in the world feel better. 

“When I came out to my parents -” Nasir held the plate out to Agron, who looked up at him through red-rimmed eyes and then took it from him without much thought or even interest, “They kicked me out. I didn't have any money and I stayed on the streets for a few weeks until I managed to get a little job. Anyway, one day, I stopped by the food pantry, and they didn't have very much, but they had these little containers of chocolate pudding. I didn't have a fridge or anything, so they were probably risky after the first day or so, but I lived off of those things for a week.” 

That was as much of an explanation as he gave, and while Agron didn't really have words – Agron wasn't good with words when it came to emotional situations, he never had been – when Nasir sat down, Agron slid closer to him and pressed their thighs together comfortingly. But he didn't eat dinner either, and only took a few bites when Nasir started giving him the sort of looks that again bore the worry of earlier that morning. 

They made it to the bed that night, and under the broken light of the street lamps coming in through the window finished their exploration of each other with soft lips and gentler hands until Agron was too wrapped up in Nasir's warmth to worry. 

From there they settled into an easy sort of routine. 

On the third day, Nasir pushed Agron's morning breath away and banished him to the bathroom to brush his teeth before he got another kiss, and Agron pinned him down to the bed and breathed in his face like a dragon until Nasir kneed him in the ass and shoved him away. On the fifth day, they went grocery shopping again, and this time Agron actually gave his input, and they made an effort to cook together, with Nasir teaching him how to tell when chicken was done without shredding it to little bitty pieces, and how to properly marinate meat for kebabs, and Agron teaching Nasir the joys of nutella and marshmallow crème sandwiches. It took nearly a week for Agron to actually remember to shower on his own, but even then when he did he often pulled Nasir in with him – especially when Nasir was sitting at the kitchen counter and trying to work on school work for his classes at the community college, his hair pulled up in that messy bun with the bits escaping that left his neck so exposed and vulnerable and perfect for kissing. 

After a week, Agron had to go back to work, and Nasir had to go back to classes, and there was nothing to do but try to work around their schedules. Duro was starting to get his English back, and Nasir began taking shifts of visiting him at the hospital. He also took up the task of caring for Duro's little tabby cat that Agron thought they should just lock out until it found a new home (he'd even named her: Mungojerry, which Agron'd agreed to, only because he could call her Mundungus, which served the dual purpose of reminding everyone of that little shit in Harry Potter, and having the word 'dung' in it). 

It didn't matter what classes he had the next day, or how tired he was, Nasir set his alarm to wake up a half an hour before the end of Agron's shift and set something easy on the stove for them to have for supper. Agron returned the favor by waking up when Nasir had to leave for class and have a bowl of cereal with him.

And in those two weeks while Duro was stuck in the hospital, Agron would not have known what to do without Nasir there. It was practically as perfect as anything could be. 

Except that when they got the news that Duro could come home, Nasir felt his heart sink into his stomach.


	13. We're All Just Stories in the End

“You don't have to come with me, you know. I can go pick him up by myself.” 

They'd been having this same conversation for the past thirty minutes, while Agron went about changing the sheets in Duro's bedroom to his favorite hunter green ones with the paler green stripes that were wearing out right in the middle where Duro liked to sleep and cleaning up the dust that'd started to gather in his room. Nasir wasn't helping with this part because he thought it was silly when there were dishes in the sink to be worrying about the level of dust in Duro's room, but he was leaning against the door frame and wearing a look that hovered somewhere between boredom and frustration. 

“Agron. We've discussed this. We've been discussing this. It's stupid. I've seen how emotional you get. You're likely to wreck, and then there'd be two of you in the hospital. It's just not worth it. I'll drive you.” 

Agron didn't even look up at him. He just continued straightening the pillows on Duro's bed to make sure they were properly fluffed. “Alright.” 

 

\----

 

_“I think Gordon Ramsay cusses more than you.”_

Agron was sitting in the back seat of the car with Duro's head in his lap, cording his fingers carefully through messy dreds that desperately needed to be washed. 

_“I think they shouldn't have let you watch so much awful tv. You didn't need to lose any more brain cells.”_

_“Hurrhurr. Says the guy using only his brute strength as a beat-cop.”_

_“Says the guy with no job at all.”_

_“Says the guy who's letting his brother freeload off of him indefin-”_

“Do you guys want to stop and get some food?” 

They've been talking in German pretty much non-stop since they picked Duro up at the hospital, and Nasir isn't even sure that Agron's told him about the fact that Nasir's been staying at the house or that they're dating. Which is kind of reasonable, because Nasir's not even sure they're dating, but still it bothers him, and he makes a point to interrupt. 

“No, I just want to get him home and cleaned up and back in bed.” Agron says, and then without even a hesitation it's back to: 

_“Did they even wash you there? You stink.”_

_“Of course they did. I wasn't about to turn down the option of free sponge-baths. You know, except that the nurse on my floor was this old lady who's teeth were yellow and crooked.”_

_“You're complaining about people's teeth now? I know we've been in the States too long.”_

 

\----

 

Nasir was looking at old photograph books he'd picked up off the shelf. They were full of pictures of the brothers when they were children, with their parents back in Germany. Visiting France and the Eiffel Tower – Duro hanging on the edge of the side and threatening to throw himself off dramatically, and Agron acting like he was pushing him, with one hand holding onto his brother's ankle too make sure he didn't actually go anywhere. They were probably eight and five in that picture. Pictures of the two of them in the bath at a far more innocent age, splashing and with bubbles piled high atop their heads. A picture of Duro's naked butt as he ran with a towel clutched in one hand, quite obviously screaming from the camera. 

They were probaby taken amidst the same sort of giggling he was hearing coming from the bathroom, and then the bedroom. A sort of laughter that didn't need words or explanations, but was just happiness. 

He was trying to stay out of the way and not interrupt their time together. 

When Agron came out and went into the kitchen to make Duro a hot chocolate, his brother tucked up in bed under the covers that were so familiar, he barely looked over at Nasir. He was too engrossed in what he was doing. Too caught up in taking care of his brother. 

Nasir tried not to let it get to him. 

 

\---- 

 

It was the first night they slept without any sort of preamble. Agron didn't question Nasir's presence, and when he reached over him to turn off the light, he gave him a kiss on the tip of his nose before laying back down under the covers. 

“I think he'll be okay. I mean, his English isn't back – not for speaking. But apparently he could understand the tv, and he's joking and laughing. It's not like he can go back to school any time soon though. Or get a part time job. I might have to pick up some extra shifts -” 

Agron carried on like that until his words got slower, and he drifted off to sleep. 

 

\----

 

When he woke up, Agron was gone. 

All it took was treading to the bathroom for his morning pee though to hear the sound of the two of them whispering through the walls. Duro was obviously hurting from the tone of his voice, and Agron was trying desperately to comfort him. When Nasir made it to the kitchen for a glass of water, he saw that one of the cups of pudding he made last week was missing, though, and he can't help but smile. 

 

\----

 

Agron slept through breakfast, and Nasir left without so much as seeing him before class. 

 

\----

 

They hadn't ever discussed anything, really. 

They'd just sort of fallen into this daily routine of talking and kissing and eating together. 

Nasir had plenty of time to think about it in between his classes that day. It was all so easy, really. The falling into such a regular pattern with Agron. Something about the man just made it easy for Nasir to forget about the real life things, like the fact that Agron was hurting over his brother, and that he might just need someone to fill that void while Duro was in the hospital. It made sense of course; they were close, that much was obvious, and what could Nasir really expect? 

Agron was a grown man in every sense of the word. He had his life together. He had a good career with medical benefits and a pension and was respectable. 

Nasir was barely more than a kid, who could only afford community college thanks to grants and worked in the cafeteria at school, serving up the least nutritious breakfasts he'd ever seen. He had a bed he rented in a shared room with three other guys that he paid for by the week and was probably already rented out by now. Hell, he had a record, and Agron'd been the arresting officer a couple of times. 

Who was he kidding, thinking this was more than just some little fling? 

Something to take his mind off of Duro, while his brother was in the hospital. 

And now that Duro was home? There was obviously no space for Nasir in Agron's life. That much was obvious, and even if he realized that he was being just a little bit unfair since Duro'd just come home the day before, he was pretty sure that not admitting it was lying to himself. It was leading himself on, with a thing that was never going to be what it was. 

Several times during the day, he'd taken out his phone and flipped it open, and pulled up the message thread with Agron. 

 

**Marco.**

**Polo. You know this game doesn't work if you don't do it aloud, right?**

**It does when I can hear your ringtone.**

**Point. Captain Crunch or Fruitloops?**

 

Nasir'd found him after that, and they'd decided that despite Nasir arguing that they didn't actually need any more cereal at all, they'd get both. 

It had been a “they” decision. Agron'd asked him his opinion and taken it into consideration, and the more Nasir looked at it, the more it irritated him, because there wasn't a “they,” was there? There was just Nasir, crashing at Agron's and sleeping with him and cooking for him – and he couldn't really be mad at Agron, which probably made him even madder. Because he understood. He understood that Agron'd needed comfort, and hadn't offered Nasir anything else. Hadn't promised him anything else. That was all a future built up in Nasir's own head. 

He didn't wind up texting him. 

Nasir just decided to stop intruding. 

He went back to his landlord after class, and talked to him about possibly renting a bed. They were all taken for the week, but after a bit of begging and pleading, and offering him the same full rent, Nasir finally managed to convince him to let him crash on the sofa, and had gone back by Agron's apartment while the man was at work to get his stuff. He paused outside of Duro's room, where he could hear the guy sitting up in bed and shouting obscenities – something explained when he heard the distinctive sounds of Modern Warfare in the background as well. 

Better not to interrupt him, he thought. 

It wasn't like Duro could speak to him right now anyway. 

\----

Something was off. 

Agron could tell as soon as he walked in the door to the apartment, but he couldn't quite put his finger on exactly what was out of place. He paused in the kitchen and looked around with his eyes narrowed as he tried to realize exactly what it was, before he walked into Duro's room to check on him. He was passed out, a video game controller still in his hand, and the lid off of his bottle of pills. It made Agron smile and shake his head as he picked up the controller and turned off the console and the TV, followed by putting the lid back on the pills and getting his baby brother a fresh glass of water to sit by his bedside in case he woke up. He leaned in and pressed a kiss to Duro's forehead, and lingered there for a few moments a smile on his face. 

But once he walked away, closing the door quietly behind him, it hit him instantly what was wrong. 

“Nasir?” He called, walking into the bedroom and half expecting just to see that Nasir'd fallen asleep early; it was understandable. He worked late. But the bed was empty. 

Next he checked the bathroom. 

When he wasn't there either, and Agron stopped to look around the living room again, his eyes lingered on the little table beside the tv that'd become Nasir's makeshift desk over the past couple of weeks and the notably absent stack of books. No books. No extra toothbrush in the bathroom. (Nasir'd insisted on firm bristles; he said the soft ones did no good, and could not be talked into a compromise; “It's not like you'll be using it. Why does it matter if I won't get one with medium bristles?” “You'll brush your gums off. That'll be gross.” He'd also rolled his eyes at Agron for that.) No clothes in the bedroom. 

Nasir was gone. 

Agron went to bed that night unsure what he did wrong, or why Nasir hadn't even bothered to tell him. For as much as he hadn't seemed to notice Nasir in his bed the night before, his absence tonight felt like a black hole. 

 

\---- 

 

It took him two days to call Nasir. 

Two days where Nasir was convinced that he was right: that Agron hadn't even noticed his absence in his life now that he had Duro back around. Two days where Agron tried his best to figure out what he'd done wrong to make Nasir leave and how he could best make up for it. 

Agron wracked his brain, and thought of little else. He puzzled it out with Duro in between moments of shooting up random twelve year olds who had worse mouths than Agron on Xbox Live while they were both tucked into his bed. 

_“Fucking – Goddamn it.”_

_“Seriously, dude. It's just a game.”_ Duro grinned at him and tried to give him a light shove, but he still couldn't lift his arm enough for that. 

Agron rolled his eyes and just barely resisted the urge to throw the controller across the room. One or two “highly recommended” sessions of anger management through his job had taught him better than that. Throwing things, it turned out, was not a very healthy way of dealing with your anger, it turned out. 

_“I don't even know what I fucking **did** , Duro!” _

_“Oh. So we're back to that again. Look, I know this may be rocket science, and it might be hard for someone so blue collar to understand – but why don't you just **ask** him, bro?”_

It seemed too easy. 

Things couldn't be just that easy, could they? 

But then, after two days of that questioning, Duro was threatening to ignore his neck injury and his broken arm and throw Agron straight out the window if he didn't get off his ass and call the guy. He wasn't sure whether it was the threat to himself or to Duro's health that'd motivated him, or if he'd finally just decided that he couldn't live with this limbo of not knowing. So he'd called. 

And every ring that went on was like a rock dropped straight into his stomach. 

“Yeah?” 

Nasir answered on the fourth ring, sounding incredibly distracted and entirely disinterested. It was a carefully constructed ruse. 

Agron had to swallow a rock that got caught in his throat. 

“Hey. I just –“ He started, and then stopped almost immediately, reaching down to grip onto the edge of the counter with his free hand until his knuckles turned white. “Can you come over? I'd rather talk about this in person.” 

“What's there to talk about?” Nasir wasn't actually doing anything. He was sitting on the sofa and eating some noxiously unhealthy concoction of nutella and toast and marshmallow crème and pretending like it was the sort of thing he did normally. When he answered, it was with a full mouth and an obvious swallow. “I get it. We're good.” 

“You get – Please come over? I really hate cellphones. Can we please talk about this in person?” 

He felt panic rising in his chest, because what exactly did Nasir _get_? 

Nasir just sighed, and looked at the clock as if that made any real difference. 

“Fine. Give me a half an hour.” 

 

\---- 

 

A half an hour was far too long. It gave Agron far too much time to think. Far too much time to overthink. Far too much time to worry about what it was that Nasir got when he was so in the dark. Duro just laughed at him until he'd closed Duro's door and ignored any shouts coming from the other side of it for him to open it back up. 

_”Come on, Agron! I want to see your humiliation! It's my right as an annoying younger sibling!”_

 

\----

 

Thankfully, by the time Nasir arrived, Duro'd given up on having Agron open the door back up. Sometime during the wait, Agron took it upon himself to cook Nasir dinner for when he arrived. He wasn't sure how things were going to go, but at least he wouldn't be sending Nasir away with an empty stomach. So when Nasir walked into the flat, there was the smell and sound of scrambled eggs cooking, and Agron seemed to actually be doing a decent job of it. 

At least until he saw Nasir. 

Because the instant he saw him, Agron forgot all about cooking eggs and the fact that sometimes people who were angry with you didn't want you to hug them and crossed the room and slipped his arms around Nasir and pulled him into the sort of hug that involved burying his nose into Nasir's hair that still smelled vaguely of oil and not letting him go until the kitchen started to fill with the smell of smoke. Even then it still only ended when Nasir pushed him away and made his way over to the stove to clean up Agron's mess with the eggs, and it very suddenly dawned on Nasir that while Agron might appear to have his life together, there were certainly ways he could benefit from someone to take care of him. 

He didn't say anything yet though, just cleaned up the eggs in silence while he waited for Agron to speak. 

“What do you mean?” Agron asked, after a whole five seconds of crushing silence, demonstrating his trademarked levels of patience. “What is it that you _get_? Because I don't get it, and it might be fair if we start off on the same page.” 

Nasir sighed, and set the pan in the sink. 

Agron could clean his own dishes. 

“I get that there were no expectations here. That your brother was in the hospital. That you needed comfort. It's fine. It's human. I'm not mad. But then it was time for me to go; you had your brother back, and you didn't need me anymore. That's just the way life w-” 

“I'll always need you.” 

“What?” 

Nasir looked at him like Agron'd just spoken a foreign language. Agron looked away, down at his feet. At the tiles under them, and the crack that ran the length of the one directly under his big toe, because it dawned on him only when Nasir looked at him like that that he'd just been far more forward than most people were comfortable with. It dawned on him that Nasir wasn't used to how he worked, with passions and impulses taking over and ruling him when he was serious about something. 

“I just – I mean -” He wasn't the sort of person who blushed, but if he was, he would have been blushing then, “I like you, Nasir. A lot, actually. And I'd like to keep seeing you.” 

At first Nasir didn't know how to process that. He was not at all used to someone with Agron's openness. He wasn't used to someone being so straight forward or so passionate about anything, let alone him, and it was more than a little bit flattering, and perhaps a bit overwhelming. He looked around the apartment for a few moments, almost as if he was mentally categorizing it while he tried to process it all. 

And just when Agron thought he was about to explode from the lack of answer, Nasir turned and walked back over to the sink and squirted a dose of soap onto the pot. 

“Alright.” He said, looking up at Agron with a secretively pleased smile, his eyes dancing with amusement when they met Agron's own. “You need someone to teach you how to cook anyway.” 

The pan clattered into the sink noisily when Agron crossed the room in a single step to catch Nasir's head between his hands and kissed him with an entirely different sort of passion. From behind the door of Duro's bedroom, Nasir swore he could hear a whoop of encouragement, but he couldn't even muster the energy to be angry. 

Not when they finally had each other.


End file.
